St. John XXIII – Church of the Catholic University Parish Cologne

The impetus came in 1964, when the Catholic University Parish planned to build a student residence, a community house and a church for around 300 people on its site. Heinz Buchmann won the architectural competition for the entire complex. Decisive for the artistic direction was the sculptor Josef Rikus, who was closely connected with the then university chaplain Wilhelm Nyssen. Together they determined that the church should be conceived from the interior, from the congregation and the liturgy outward — not as a monument meant to impress from the outside. As guiding symbols they chose the cave and the tree, the root of Jesse as a metaphor of the earthly; the whole architecture was to grow out of the tree, wrapped only in thin walls of glass or concrete palisades. Those involved remembered the exact authorship differently, but the building is regarded as a successful collaboration of several minds. The church was built in 1968–1969; only a few contemporary documents on its execution survive, and the architect's estate is now held in the Archive for Architecture and Engineering NRW.

The furnishings, too, are part of the overall concept and bear the mark of Josef Rikus. He made the altar, ambo, tabernacle and sedilia from heavy blocks of oak, whose natural material echoes the central tree motif. The ground-level altar stands at eye level with the congregation beneath the "branches" of the central tree, while the baptismal site lies below in the "cave" of the crypt. The windows of blue and deep-red antique glass follow designs by Will Thonett and mediate between walls and roof. The Pietà was created in 2002 by Egbert Verbeek, who also made the large triptych in the crypt; the Stations of the Cross are the work of Karl Kaspers.