Böhm was born in Offenbach in 1920 into the third generation of a family of church architects; his father Dominikus Böhm was among the most inventive German church builders of the 1920s. He trained as a sculptor as well as an architect, and it shows in work that is modelled rather than assembled. His first independent building was the Cologne chapel Madonna in den Trümmern, built into a bombed church between 1947 and 1950. What followed — Nevigeser Wallfahrtsdom, the Bensberg town hall, the Bergisch Gladbach and Bocholt churches — is a body of sculptural work in concrete, steel and glass. In 1986 he became the first German architect to receive the Pritzker Prize. He died in Cologne in 2021, aged a hundred and one.
