Architect Peter Zumthor

Art Museum Kolumba, Cologne, Germany, 2007
The museum of the archbishopric of Cologne combines multiple levels of history — the ruins of the Gothic church of St. Kolumba, destroyed during World War II, a chapel built in 1950 to enclose a late-Gothic statue of the Virgin that survived the war, an archeological excavation conducted in the 1970s that discovered Roman and Medieval remains. All of it is tied together by Zumthor's new museum, which incorporates the Gothic ruins directly into his minimalist walls.

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