Bruder Klaus Field Chapel

The Scheidtweilers approached Zumthor while he was building the Kolumba museum in Cologne, wanting to raise a chapel on their own land in thanks for a good life. Planning began in 2001 and construction ran from 2005 to 2007. The client felled 112 spruce trunks in a nearby wood and stood them as a tent-shaped inner formwork; around it a volunteer ramming crew, working with skilled tradesmen in the region's old tradition, laid the rammed-concrete body in fifty-centimetre lifts over twenty-four days to a height of twelve metres, using concrete, river gravel and reddish sand from the surrounding fields. In autumn 2006 a smouldering fire was kept burning inside for three weeks, charring the trunks and loosening them from the concrete so they could be drawn out. The floor is a tin-and-lead alloy melted and poured in place; 350 mouth-blown glass plugs stop the formwork tie holes. The chapel was blessed on 19 May 2007.