Heiligkreuzkirche Chur, designed by Walter Maria Förderer with Rolf G. Otto and Hans Zwimpfer, is a postwar Catholic parish center in northern Chur where church, community rooms, residence, hall, and kindergarten are consolidated into a continuous, exposed-concrete composition shaped by liturgical reform and the surrounding mountain landscape.
Church of the Holy Cross Technical Information
- Architects: Walter Maria Forderer
- Location: Masanserstrasse 161, Chur, Switzerland
- Project Years: 1964 – 1969
- Photographs: © Trevor Patt
I imagined the church as a mass of rock broken from the nearby mountain wall and placed on this site.
– Walter Maria Forderer
Site, Approach, and Urban Presence
Heiligkreuzkirche stands in the Masans district on the northern edge of Chur, close to Masanserstrasse and within sight of the mountain landscape that shaped its architectural concept. At the time of its construction, the area was not yet fully absorbed into the city. The church therefore occupied an exposed condition between settlement and open ground, allowing its concrete mass to read less as an urban infill object than as an artificial outcrop.
The approach is calibrated as a sequence of compression and release. From the street, the visitor encounters the vertical bell tower and a sunken courtyard before passing through a dim passage beneath heavy concrete elements. This threshold delays direct entry into the nave and turns arrival into a spatial transition, moving from traffic and daylight toward enclosure, shadow, and ritual concentration.
The project was conceived not as an isolated church but as a parish center. Worship space, community rooms, priest’s residence, parish hall, and kindergarten are absorbed into a single concrete field. This decision gives the complex a social dimension beyond liturgy, although the sculptural force of the church and tower clearly dominates the ensemble and sets the terms for every subsidiary function.
Concrete as Mass, Surface, and Structure
The building is constructed as a continuous, exposed reinforced-concrete structure, with stepped blocks, deep reveals, projecting volumes, and voids organized into a dense plastic composition. Rather than expressing structure through a legible frame, Forderer treats concrete as mass. The walls, roofs, terraces, and openings appear carved and accumulated, producing the impression of a quarried formation shaped by both gravity and excavation.
Board-marked surfaces retain the grain of the timber formwork, giving the concrete a tactile register that counters the abstraction of the overall geometry. The deep-set windows, often framed in warm-toned timber, puncture the mass without dissolving it. Wood also appears in benches, doors, rails, pews, and liturgical furnishings, but it functions as a precise counter-material rather than a softening device.
The bell tower extends the same sculptural language vertically. Its polygonal shaft is marked by irregular rectangular openings and capped by a large double cross form, rotated in plan to address multiple directions. The tower is therefore both a marker and a fragment, belonging to the same geological imagination as the church, while giving the complex a visible presence along the road.
Liturgical Space and Postwar Sacred Form
The main worship space is a column-free angular semicircle organized around a centrally placed wooden altar. This plan reflects the liturgical changes associated with the Second Vatican Council, which encouraged a closer spatial relationship between congregation and altar. Forderer abandons the long axial nave in favor of a gathered arrangement where pews fan around the act of worship.
The absence of columns is critical to this liturgical intent. The hall is not subdivided into aisles or directed toward a remote sanctuary. Instead, the congregation occupies a shared room shaped by stepped concrete walls and ceiling planes. The altar remains distinct through its raised timber platform and asymmetrical form, yet its position reduces the hierarchical distance between the clergy and the assembly.
A perimeter passage allows the hall to be circumnavigated, adding a second spatial layer around the central room. This ambulatory-like condition does not directly imitate historical church typologies, but it reinterprets movement around a sacred center through a postwar spatial language. The plan becomes both communal and processional, combining assembly with circulation.
Light, Atmosphere, and Interior Sequencing
The interior relies on indirect daylight rather than large frontal openings. Windows are frequently concealed within the stepped concrete envelope, so light enters through clerestories, deep recesses, and lateral cuts. This produces a dark, cave-like atmosphere in which illumination registers as a material event across rough concrete surfaces rather than as a uniform wash.
Movement through the complex is structured by contrasts of scale and brightness. Low passages and shadowed undercrofts give way to the taller worship space, while narrow thresholds open into the broad semicircular hall. The sequence depends on the physical weight of concrete, but also on voids, setbacks, and concealed openings that prevent the mass from becoming static.
Within the nave, light-toned wood establishes a measured dialogue with the concrete shell. Pews, altar, crucifix, ambo, and other furnishings remain visually distinct from the grey envelope, yet their geometric language aligns with the building’s angular order. The result is not a decorative overlay but an integrated liturgical landscape in which furniture, structure, and light participate in the same spatial argument.
About Forderer, Otto, Zwimpfer
Forderer, Otto, Zwimpfer was a Basel-based design office associated with Walter Maria Forderer, Rolf G. Otto, and Hans Zwimpfer. Forderer opened his own Basel office with Otto in 1956; Zwimpfer joined, and the trio worked together from 1958 to 1964. Their work developed through bold geometric forms, raw concrete, and a sculptural approach to architecture, with Forderer later recognized as a leading figure in neo-expressionist and Brutalist church architecture.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Client: Katholische Kirchgemeinde Chur
- Competition-winning design office: Forderer, Otto, Zwimpfer, Basel, with Rolf G. Otto and Hans Zwimpfer;
- Executing associates: R. Luescher and J. Meier;
- Organ: Orgelbau Th. Kuhn AG;
- Bells: Glockengiesserei Eschmann, Rickenbach TG
- Stations of the Cross: Dea Murk
- Image of the Virgin: Klaus Arnold
- Parish house interior, 2003: Vincenzo Cangemi
- Photographs: Trevor Patt
- Research references or publications: Das Werk 12/1971; 52 Beste Bauten – Baukultur Graubünden 1950-2000, Bundner Heimatschutz, 2019.
