Visions for the "Backenzahn"

At the foot of Aachen's Kronenberg, the Catholic Church of St. Hubertus, completed in 1964, is an architectural gem designed by Pritzker Prize winner Gottfried Böhm. Once a lively quarter church, the building, which is sometimes popularly known as the "Backenzahn" (molar), is now rarely used, so that as a result of the "Kirchliches Immobilienmanagement" (KIM) process in the Aachen diocese, an - initially fictitious - future alternative use is now to be developed for the church building.

The design project in the winter semester of 2021/22 was aimed to explore the spatial and functional potential of the formerly slate-clad "rock of concrete" anew and (following the architect's original idea of a veritable community center) to devise uses in and around the church building that (once again) make this place, which was actually intended as an entrance to the neighborhood, a point of attraction and connection. Like the pilgrimage church in Neviges or the churches of the St. Hildegard Center for the Elderly in Düsseldorf-Garath and the Bethanien Children's Village in Bergisch Gladbach-Refrath, Böhm never conceived of the St. Hubertus Church in Aachen as a free-standing solitaire, but rather as the central architecture of a larger complex, which was not realized in Aachen.

The project was carried out in teams of two and continued in the summer semester of 2022 with the collaborative conception of the exhibition "Vorstadtikone".