Located at the transition between urban and landscape areas, the new church designed by Meck Architects arranges the sensitive urban situation like a keystone.
The church of Seliger Pater Rupert Mayer in the town of Poing, near Munich in Germany, is topped with a ceramic crown clad with 15,000 white, three-dimensional tiles. The bell bearer and the rectory are reduced in height. They form the room edges for the church square and thus the street-side frame for the church.
When the visitor enters the church interior sloping down towards the altar, a room of light striving towards the sky opens up. In analogy to the Trinity, three large light openings with their respective light guides shape the different liturgical locations and actions.
The church is supported both statically and in terms of content by an oversized spatial cross that reveals itself to the visitor as a powerful image in the form of the folded roof. The space shell, which is thus well-proportioned, creates different places of prayer. The arrangement of the liturgical places and stalls is shaped by the spirit of communion and the choreography of the liturgical acts.
The base of the church is a solidly bricked base made of Nagelfluh, which is popularly known as "Herrgottsbeton". The moving roof landscape, clad with white ceramic tiles, rises above it and unfolds its sculptural power. The three-dimensional design of the ceramic tiles is borrowed from the clearance profile of the church interior. The differentiation between the white room crown and the stone floor and wall plinth thematizes the idea of heaven and earth, of transcendence and immanence, in the area of tension in which the church is located.
On top of a spherical, gilded roof cross, a rooster looks to the east. A picture that has been familiar since an early age: with morning our gaze is directed towards Christ, the rising sun. A church of closeness and encounter: understandable, open, inviting and present.
