Sankt Bonifaz

Sankt Bonifaz stands in Germany as a cylindrical church faced with warm red-brown brick. Kurt and Klaus Oberberger designed the building, completed in 1970 for a growing postwar congregation. Its wider complex includes a parish centre, vicarage, community hall, youth rooms and kindergarten.

Inside, a sixteen-sided room nearly thirty metres across gathers every view beneath a wooden tent roof. Sixteen roof panels shape the light, sound and shared focus of the interior. The Marienkapelle holds a Catalan-Romanesque Madonna and Child from the thirteenth century. Otto Schafarschik’s ceramic Stations of the Cross line the walls, while Josef Oberberger’s fourteen coloured windows animate the space.

Josef Zeilhuber’s organ has displayed open pipes and sounded here since 1970. Four bells by Rudolf Perner hang in the square, twenty-one-metre tower. Together, the architecture, artwork and music centre on one striking detail: sixteen roof panels converging above the communal room.