Basso Profundo and a Bit Wild !

By KURT ANDERSEN

When the first annual $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize was awarded seven years ago to Philip Johnson, cynics and grumps concluded that the field's new quasi-Nobel would go only to superstars, and American superstars at that. But the Pritzker juries have shrewdly avoided pop provincialism in their selections, including among their subsequent laureates Luis Barragan, the reticent Mexican minimalist, and Austria's Hans Hollein.

The winner of the 1986 prize, announced last week, is even more interestingly arcane. West German Gottfried Bohm, 66, has had only three projects built outside his own country, received no formal international honorific until 1983, and goes unmentioned in most modern surveys of the field. Bohm is precisely the kind of little-known architect for whom such a prize can mean the most. His body of built work is large and as fine as that of any living European, and two buildings at either end of his career--an extraordinary 1964 church complex in Neviges and a 1984 office building outside Stuttgart--are masterpieces. Bohm has not inspired many acolytes or copycats, but his sui generis genius is indisputable.

A sculptor trained as an engineer, Bohm was never an obedient pattern-book modernist. In the late '50s and early '60s, years before the American manifestos that called for a revival of historical forms, Bohm was actually building dreamy, neo-medieval churches. Yet he is contemptuous of what he calls "mindless imitation of earlier eras," the piecemeal and often precious applique of stylish bits and pieces of the architectural past. Indeed, the invigorating paradox of his work is that for all his respectful traditionalism, he is excited by new construction materials and technologies, dead set on formal invention. "I have never veered away from my basic quest to attempt the new," he says.

His church for Roman Catholic pilgrims in Neviges and his town hall for Bensberg, finished the same year just 25 miles apart, are singular and splendid. At Bensberg he deferred to the site and its history as architects of the modern period never imagined they might. Among medieval ruins he built, out of concrete, a small office wing and, most astoundingly, an adjacent stair tower with a romantic mock-stone top. Existing proportion, scale, texture and spirit were respected, exact verisimilitude not even attempted. Bensberg is restored faithfully, not fetishistically.

The church at Neviges is all top, a 114-ft.-high cubist mountain of molded and sandblasted concrete that Lyonel Feininger or a saner, northern Gaudi might have designed. The dramatic, deeply cut facets and escarpments, inside and out, achieve a German churchly ideal, simultaneously grave and passionate, massive yet full of light, basso profundo but also a little wild. How felicitous that a German of Bohm's generation has spent a good part of his career designing religious buildings--about half of his 45 built projects.

Bohm did not, to his great credit, turn his novel, expressive forms of the early '60s into a meretricious signature style. If anything, he searched too hard for new ways to build: from 1968 to 1975 only three projects were realized. He avoided the period's grim brutalist extremes, but Bohm's mid-' 70s alternative--elaborately engineered office and apartment blocks rife with bays and balconies--seems overwrought and fussy.

During the past decade, his work has become coherent and confident again, partly by means of a lightly worn classicism. For the Zueblin construction company's new headquarters outside Stuttgart, he has produced an improbable but marvelous synthesis. A kind of oversize trompe l'oeil portcullis, Zueblin House is monumental and yet entirely permeable, lucid but not glib. The clear, simple axes and pitched-roof profile are classical, and the expansive ectoskeletal shed seems snatched from some 19th century dream of the 20th. The building's priapic pivot alludes to Bohm's own pioneering work: the central spiraling stair could be an ancestor or descendant of the tower at Bensberg.

Bohm practiced all the post-modernist tenets long before they were preached, yet his buildings provide none of the easy reassurance of neat taxonomy. His work has evolved continually, but not in response to shifts in fashion or doctrine. Like Finland's Alvar Aalto, Bohm invented his own humane, smart architectural dialect, and then waited patiently for the rest of the world to learn it.

With reporting by Franz Spelman/Cologne