St. Matthäus Düsseldorf-Garath by Gottfried Böhm
St Matthew's is a Catholic parish church in the south-west of the Düsseldorf district of Garath. It was built between 1968 and 1970 according to plans by Gottfried Böhm and is counted among the most important examples of modern church architecture.
Böhm created an unmistakable landmark for Garath in his personalised design language without symmetry, creatively alluding to Romanesque stylistic elements. The ground floor of St Matthew's is predominantly made of brick, while the upper storey is made of exposed concrete.
For this project which consists of a church, chapel and retirement home, Böhm combined concrete and brick into a sculptural composition, playfully citing archetypal elements of medieval castle architecture: The retirement home, which surrounds the church and chapel, seems like a castle wall with its rounded protrusions and crenellation. The church St. Matthäus surmounts the outer buildings with its turret like towers. The chapel St. Hildegardis, which is connected with the retirement home, is a miniature version of Böhm’s signature “concrete rock”, which was most prominently realized on a large scale in Neviges.
Gottfried Böhm is regarded as an important modernist architect and an "exceptional phenomenon of German post-war architecture" and was the last personality of the generation of architects who shaped the post-1945 reconstruction in West Germany and West German post-war modernism. In 1986, he was the first German architect to be honoured with the prestigious Pritzker Prize.
