St. Mary's Church (Marienkirche)

About the building

On Wylerstrasse in the Breitenrain quarter, the Catholic Marienkirche first catches the eye with its slender tower at the west corner. At the top sits a belfry set off in a different colour, with round-arched openings on slim supports and a flat hipped roof. The walls have a coarse, beige-brown render. In front of the main entrance a porch opens in three arches, framed by the tower on one side and the octagonal top of the baptistery on the other. The city's heritage office counts the building among the earliest works of emerging modernism in Bern.

The city's Catholic population had grown strongly, and the Trinity Church was no longer enough. As early as 1910 the Roman Catholic church association bought part of the site at the urging of the priest Josef Emil Nünlist, who for years also raised money overseas for the Bern parish. When the plans became public in 1929, there was outrage in the press and objections from the neighbourhood. After a competition among four architects, the jury chose Fernand Dumas of Romont in 1930. The foundation stone was laid on 31 March 1931; on 18 December 1932 the still unfinished church was blessed and the parish founded at the same time, and on 17 May 1933 the Bishop of Basel consecrated it. The building inventory gives 1930 to 1933 as the construction period.

Dumas (1892–1956) built some 15 Catholic churches in the 1920s and 1930s, in a style between neoclassicism and modernism, and liked to work with artists, among them the sculptor François Baud. In Bern he built a concrete frame filled in with sand-lime brick. According to Wikipedia, the tower, about 41 metres high, was raised to the belfry in just 15 days using slipforming, which was then used in Switzerland for the first time.

The reliefs with scenes from the life of Mary on the portals were made by Baud and Gaston Faravel in 1933. Albin Schweri created the mosaic of the Assumption on the choir wall (1937) and a series of stained-glass windows. A long arcade leads to the parish house of 1964; under the first plan, arcades would have enclosed the whole square to the south like a cloister. The building inventory is reminded by this architecture of Giorgio de Chirico's "pittura metafisica". The choir was remodelled in 1969 and from 1994 to 1998. A detail on the west front: the glazing bars of the large round window form an "M".

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Bauinventar der Stadt Bern: Wylerstrasse 26 · Wikipedia (de): Marienkirche (Bern) · Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz: Dumas, Fernand (Christoph Allenspach) · Wikidata: Q51616456