I came across this photograph and assumed it must be a film set from a 1960s sci-fi flick. Surely those nuns haven’t just come from a prayer session inside that monstrous building? As it turns out, this picture of architectural doom is indeed of a real Catholic church, located in a small medieval hamlet close to Dusseldorf, Germany. One of Brutalism’s finest, it is the work of Gottfried Böhm, hailed as the “son, grandson, husband, and father of architects.”

The Church of the Pilgrimage in Neviges, also known as Neviges Mariendom, was built in 1968 at the height of the Brutalist movement. Out of 17 architects invited to design a new church for the historic pilgrimage site, Böhm’s was chosen by judges and the concrete structure became widely considered as his greatest work. In 1986, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize.

Reminiscent of a coal bunker from the outside, it actually gets better on the inside. I suppose it’s growing on me in a dystopian, cold war, retrofuturist sort of way…

But still, talk about putting the (concrete) fear of god into them…