With its clear and powerful design language, the Dominikuszentrum forms a cultural and intellectual centre in the newly created district on Munich's Nordheide. It thus creates an appropriate counterpart to the urban square in the north of the quarter, which is in direct visual contact. In an architectural sculpture cut from brick, the prayer room and the social and cultural facilities are grouped around a central, contemplative courtyard. Various passageways invite you to enter or walk through. The main passageway facing the square also forms the spatial envelope for the extended prayer room.
The prayer room is the meaningful and spiritual centre of the complex. Both from the green diagonal and from the perspective of Neuherbergstraße, it can be experienced as a formative body that towers over the basis of the other facilities and dominates the district square.
Adjacent to the prayer room is the parish and youth centre with its large parish hall and the various group rooms. On the first floor is the youth office for the deaneries of Feldmoching and Freimann. The rooms are oriented towards two large roof terraces, which offer an outdoor area for the young people that shields them from view and noise. Opposite is the three-storey Caritas building section with multi-purpose rooms, offices and administration. All facilities are accessed from the common courtyard, which is survived by the tree (trumpet tree).
The characteristic material of the plant is a particularly high-quality fired red brick; a peat clinker. With its size and its manual-haptic quality, it stands for the human scale and for time-enduring building culture and is reminiscent of the primordial material earth. Particularly irregular stones were carefully selected to give the façade a high degree of liveliness and plasticity. The brick is used in such a way that it underlines the idea of a body cut from a brick volume.
On the outer walls of the prayer room, 300 bronze crosses are walled into the brick façade; the arrangement in groups of three symbolizes the Trinity. These crosses, developed from the scale of the hand, can also be found in the interior rooms of the building as spatial crosses.
[more ...] (https://www.meck-architekten.de/projekte/id/2008-dominikuszentrum/)
[Source: meck architekten] (https://www.meck-architekten.de/projekte/id/2008-dominikuszentrum/)
Photos: Michael Heinrich, Sebastian Lelle
