Emil Steffann

Theme of this paper is the form of 20th century’s architecture for Catholic worship, before the Second Vatican Council, in some european Countries. We don’t talk about a typical modern church, wich is referred to an ideological program, a rule of expression or, simply, to a supposed historical evolution, but we read, in an objective and focused way, the process that the building of worship space makes, in the modernity, its relationship with liturgical act explicit. The text aims to show as much as is necessary to know the nature and the history of what we are called up to study and conceive. It is a way among buildings by admirable, passionate, and often unsung architects, which fully express the timeless need of an architecture that arranges fundamental signs do not requiring additional themes, because, in it, the constructive action reminds the originating structure and the symbol is inherent in the matter itself, shaped by spirit.

The modification / transformation / destruction of the church buildings is a reality which went a long way.  Discontinuities, suppressions, wars have constantly changed appearance and use of Christian buildings in Europe, for a while, but often irreversibly. The indifference towards church architecture seems  today more dramatic because it concerns, first of all, recent architectures, built in the second half of last  century: an idea of modernity of the sacred building is, in a way, shaken and questioned.
We experience that the profanization ritual in fact does not annul the sacredness of the building and hence is not able to turn it into something like ritual waste which can unproblematically be demolished or used in any way one considers appropriate. The church cannot be evaluated by functional standards; however, we can establish a quantitative parameter because of the kind of spatial proximity that can be created between people, according to a set of simultaneous places close oneto each other and which the inhabitants freely cross.
A church-exit strategy does not involve its architectural properties denial, but it can provide for their physical-metaphorical transfer. A spatial modification protocol by properties interplay is an “active form” managing a set of  “object forms”: it means to establish a topogenetic relationship between object attitude (performative) and process manner (perceptive), both interacting with the sorrounding enviroment.
Conservation and grafting become ways to link the story of the building to city's narration: we have to tell  the special beeing of this place, so a new space order can spring  from its constant topogenetic character.

The first complete and originally illustrated monograph of the master builder of churches Emil Steffann (1899-1968), whose built architecture consists, in the short time between 1950 and early Sixties, in the very considerable number of thirty-nine churches, representing an emblematic case-study of Christian worship’s buildings design, able to show its liturgical, aesthetic and morphological founding principles.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Emil Steffann’s death later this month, the Chair of Architectural History of RWTH Aachen University and the association „Dialograum Kreuzung an St. Helena“ invite you to an evening of lectures, right in the church of St. Helena, Bonn, built at the beginning of the 1960s by Steffann himself and Nikolaus Rosiny.