Gottfried Böhm

Gottfried Böhm was born on 23 January 1920 in Offenbach am Main, the son of Dominikus Böhm, a Roman Catholic church architect counted among the most respected in Europe; his paternal grandfather had also been an architect. He studied at the Technische Hochschule in Munich and then sculpture at the city's academy of fine arts, training that mattered for the clay models he made while designing his buildings. From 1947 he worked in his father's office in Cologne and carried out his first independent project there, the Chapel of the Madonna in the Ruins of St. Kolumba, completed in 1950. In 1948 he married the architect Elisabeth Haggenmüller; they had four sons, three of whom became architects. In 1951 six months in New York in Cajetan Baumann's firm, followed by a study tour, let him meet Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. When his father died in 1955 he took over the family practice.

Until the end of the 1960s his work consisted mainly of churches. From the hanging vaults of the 1950s (St. Kolumba in Cologne, St. Paulus in Velbert) he moved in the 1960s to geometric folds of concrete, then to the crystalline béton brut of Bensberg Town Hall and the Mariendom in Neviges. The latter, with its rock-like folded concrete roof, is regarded as his major work; it is often classed as brutalist, which Böhm himself denied. At Bensberg as at Bad Kreuznach he built on historic ruins, two examples of his way of uniting old and new. He himself described the concrete columns of the Church of the Resurrection in Cologne as trees that branch upwards, and the approach to that church as a long waterway lined with trees. With the Bürgerhaus in Bergisch Gladbach, in the 1970s, he moved from moulded concrete to steel and glass; from the 1980s colour and a more organic language returned, from the Mannheim University Library to the theatre in Potsdam.

A professor at the Technical University of Aachen from 1963, he taught there until 1985. In 1986 he became the first German to receive the Pritzker Prize. His sons worked in the office from the early 1980s; with his wife, they took part in some of the buildings of the 1980s and 1990s. In his view, the future of architecture lay less in going on filling up the landscape than in restoring life and order to cities and towns. He died in Cologne on 9 June 2021, aged 101.