Kolumba

Kolumba's guide begins with the firebombing that destroyed most of medieval Cologne's Saint Kolumba church in nineteen forty-three, leaving only a few walls and a five-hundred-year-old Gothic statue of Mary standing untouched amid the ash. It follows how a young architect named Gottfried Böhm, given his first solo commission, wrapped the ruins and the statue in a small octagonal chapel completed in nineteen fifty. Decades later, archaeologists digging beneath that chapel found the stacked foundations of still older churches, raising the question of what to build over layers like that. Walk the narrow bridge inside slowly, each footstep passes over a different century.