- Trier
Point of interest
As a child of the 1960s, the parish church of St Michael’s is the crowning glory of an idea that had previously established the district of Mariahof surrounding it. Created as a model city with flat-roofed bungalows on the outskirts and multi-storey homes at its centre, the new church was to pick up on this idea of ‘stepped’ architecture. Konny Schmitz ultimately won the design contest by drawing on the ancient style of a step pyramid, which soared five stories up on an almost square base.
But as if that weren’t modern enough, exposed concrete was chosen as the material, and the altar was placed as an island in the middle of the building so that the community could gather around it. In 1982, Otto Herbert Hajek created a complex series of images in the form of the Zeichen am Wege sequence and the twelve tablets in the vault. Using intense primary colours, they endeavour to depict, at multiple levels, the divine hope of salvation, the ‘New Jerusalem’, and the seven angels in the Book of Revelation. And as a ‘walk-in sculpture’, the altar room features ambiguous symbolism, which makes St Michael’s a particularly unusual modern-day church.