Kirche Christi Verklärung, Catholic church building in Heimersdorf, Germany.
Kirche Christi Verklärung is a church in Heimersdorf, Cologne, built in 1966/1967 to a design by Josef Lehmbrock. Its cross-shaped plan has four slightly inward-curving concrete walls with segmental gables, three of them windowless. The southwest wall opens through an oversized octagonal rosette window, and narrow vertical concrete fins with tall white window strips light the interior. A flat copper-clad roof covers the space.
The church was designed by architect Josef Lehmbrock and opened in 1966 as a modern religious building in Cologne. The project arose from the need for new sacred spaces in the expanding city following the postwar period.
The parish was founded in January 1963 as a rectorate parish, and its first services were held in an emergency church in the attic of a private shop, shared with the Protestant congregation. The church is dedicated to the Transfiguration of Christ; a Russian icon of the Transfiguration, added in 2000, hangs on the right side of the altar area.
The main entrance sits at the foot of the long nave, and a second entrance was later added on the left side aisle; the baptismal chapel in front of the nave lies two steps lower than its surroundings. The altar area is raised three steps and reaches into the crossing, with the pews filling the three other arms of the cross plan in a semicircle around it. The large rosette window in the southwest wall was restored over four years between 2007 and 2011.
The church's most recent addition is a Russian icon of the Transfiguration of Christ, placed on the right side of the sanctuary in 2000. In the same year, the congregation worked with Eva Marie Degenhardt on the collage Entfaltungen, which covers one of the concrete lamellae left of the altar over its full height.
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