Evangelical Lutheran Community Center

About this place

The Evangelical Lutheran Community Center in Unterhaching is a project by the Munich practice goldbrunner + hrycyk, a small office whose work falls within the tradition of careful, craft-oriented architecture that characterises the better end of Bavarian building. The project serves a Protestant congregation in Unterhaching, one of the municipalities that form Munich's southern suburban ring — a context dominated by post-war residential development with little existing urban structure to work against or with. The building's challenge is common to community architecture in the suburbs: how to create a space that registers as a destination and a gathering point within an environment that does not support that ambition through its own urban fabric. goldbrunner + hrycyk's response is a building that turns inward without being defensive — the public life of the community is organised around an interior courtyard or gathering space that provides the spatial coherence the surrounding streets cannot offer. The handling of the interface between the sacred and the social is managed through section rather than plan: the church space is differentiated from the parish rooms through height and light rather than through separation. This approach — relatively common in the best contemporary German church buildings — allows the building to function as a single coherent whole while maintaining the distinction between its modes. The project represents a type of architecture that rarely attracts attention outside specialist journals but that does essential civic work: giving small communities a building that reflects serious thought about how people gather, worship, and meet.