Architect Jong-Soung Kimm's Romanesque Architecture: Photo Essay: Germany and Belgium

A modernist architect's portrait of the sublime contradictions of Romanesque architecture

Fascinated by the architectural spaces and the construction of Romanesque architecture, renowned Korean architect Jong Soung Kimm (born 1935) visited and photographed some of the most beautiful Romanesque churches and monasteries of Germany and Belgium. Kimm, who began his career in the office of Mies van der Rohe in the 1960s, demonstrates in his photographs how the concepts of architectural volume have endured from the medieval era to modernism.

Stunning images of such landmarks as the Aachen Palatine Chapel, Worms Cathedral, Mainz Cathedral and Trier Cathedral represent how architects long ago combined dizzying, bright sacred space on the interior with imposing mass and solidity on the exterior, deploying a subtle and masterful use of materials, decoration and engineering. Accompanying texts by Kimm elucidate these great works of architecture.