Heinz Beinefeld St. Bonifatius Church

The church of S. Bonifatius is the work of the German architect Heinz Bienefeld, who trained with Dominikus Böhm at the Kölner Werkschule and later collaborated with Gottfried Böhm and Emil Steffan. Bienefeld, together with Böhm, Steffan and Rudolf Schwarz, is part of the great German school in the field of sacred architecture of the twentieth century.
“The tent of God” is the term used in the Bible, especially at the end of the book of Exodus, to indicate the place that guards the sacred symbols and consequently symbolizes the divine and spiritual “presence”. The image of the “tent” has become a sacred and architectural symbol. The Church of S. Bonifacio can be interpreted in the same way, as a search for the perfect form of architecture.
Bienefeld emphasizes the beauty of his work in the detail, nestled in the meticulous attention to the construction of thresholds and edges, in the points of passage and transition, for that imperceptible edge between different “worlds”, between inside and outside, old and new.
The refined sign of craftsmanship is manifested in the subtle reflection on the ancient, in the dialectic between the setting of the octagonal wall and the large covering.
The exhaustive search for the exact form of the work manages to confer an appropriate and precise expression and measure of the architectural object, allowing even the occasional visitor to recognize the total sacredness and silent beauty of this architecture.