Detail of the project ed. 2016

katholis­che-kirche-dieten­hofen / Architekt Frey

Design­er  Karl Frey
Loca­tion  Dietenhofen
Design Team  

Dipl.-Ing. Architekt BDA Karl Frey,
Diöze­san- und Universitätsbaumeister
mit
Dipl.-Ing. Architekt Richard Breitenhuber
Dipl.-Ing. Architekt (FH) Robert Fürsich

Year  2009
Pho­to credits  

Carl Lang, Fuerteventura

Pho­to external

Project descrip­tion

For cen­turies light has been play­ing a key role in church build­ings. In goth­ic church­es, glass win­dows were used to con­vey the­o­log­i­cal mes­sages and pro­vide mys­ti­cal atmos­phere. Light has been and still is the medi­um of all immaterial.

Enter­ing the mod­ern church of Dieten­hofen is immers­ing one­self in a space of light beyond images and symbols.

The exte­ri­or of the church con­sists of two glass shells: an out­er shell made out of scaled glass ele­ments, whose inner sur­face shows a range of screen-print­­ed lines; an inner shell made of glass with dark, hand-paint­ed and slight­ly sand­blast­ed ele­ments. Ver­ti­cal sec­tions of hand-made glass in red, blue, green and gold fill the church\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\‘s inte­ri­or with mys­ti­cal light. 

Karl Frey designed the church in the shape of an ellipse, thus deny­ing it a con­crete cen­ter, but giv­ing it two oppo­site focal points instead. Although these focal points are oppo­site to each oth­er they strong­ly cor­re­spond and thus cre­ate a spe­cif­ic dynam­ic and ten­sion. They also rep­re­sent a fun­da­men­tal ques­tion of human exis­tence: the rela­tion­ship between God and man. 

Anoth­er aspect that makes this church an impor­tant exam­ple of con­tem­po­rary archi­tec­ture is the fact that the build­ing uses regen­er­a­tive ener­gy only – the first of its kind in Germany.

Illus­tra­tive project report
Down­load report

Pho­to internal

Tech­ni­cal drawings

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