ERASED CITY - Historic context : Kolumba Museum, Peter Zumthor, 2007
The Kolumba Museum cantilevers over the old walls of the late Gothic St. Kolumba Church, which was destroyed in Word War II, and shelters a 800 m2 excavation site with ruins dating back to the 2nd century and the chapel ‘Madonna in den Trummern’ built by Gottfried Böhm after the Second World War.
The outer shell of the perforated brick facade is self-supporting and does not carry any additional vertical load. The load-bearing floor slab above the excavations functions as a hollow box on conical feet that touch the ground of the excavation walls like needles, where the load is conducted via piles into deeper layers of earth.