Ships in time.

A medieval Prussian church, restored by Schinkel and ruined in the Second World War, has been brought back to life by inserting the town library and generating symbiosis between temporal and spiritual.

Between Berlin and the not very distant Polish border is the little town of Muncheberg clustering round the Marienkirche, the thirteenth-century mother church carved out of rough stone with beautifully honed window and door openings in brick. In the early nineteenth century, Schinkel added a semi-attached campanile and Gothick details like the porches. After the destruction of Prussia in the Second World War, the church was a ruined shell, with the vestiges of its broken Gothic vaults clawing Caspar David Friedrich-like against the sky: smashed bones of skeletal fingers.

After German reunification, the ecclesiastical authorities wanted to re-roof the church and bring it back into use as a place of worship. But the little parish was not able to restore the place and keep it going without help. So a partnership was formed with the municipality to share the space as both temporal and spiritual centre. Klaus Block won the competition to make the place live again.

His radical proposal involved making a huge new form in the old nave, and allowing the old chancel to act as the church proper. The temporal element is contained in a curved structure independent of the old work. Its ash slatted walls evoke the side of a ship, so it is a ship within a ship. (The English word 'nave' has lost its relationship to the Latin for a vessel, but in German, the 'schiff' is still the part of the church in which the congregation gathers to take its communal journey to better places.) Here, four storeys high, is a kind of modern longship that has come to harbour in the old heart of the town. It contains the local library, community office, council chamber - and storage, lavatories and all the stuff not normally found in Gothic churches. The old chancel is now the church: sometimes it is used for concerts and public meetings.

In the new, inner, building, functions are naturally clearly layered on top of each other because of the thinness of the plan. On the ground floor are reception and cloakrooms, chair storage (for the chancel) and other routine things. As the inserted hull billows up and outwards, the first floor contains the library offices and control desk. Above that are the library stacks. Then, on the top floor of the new part is the town's council and conference chamber.

Stairs separate the new ship from its harbour. A lift tower, clad in diaphanous perforated metal, is an abstracted metaphor of the relationship of Schinkel's campanile to the Gothic church. The new ship is structurally separate from the old. A curved steel structure is clad in glass with a simplicity characteristic of the best German work. We should start to understand the brilliance of the best new German detailing. There is technical competence which is not flashy, invention which draws on a reservoir of craft skills, sensitivity to both old and new.

Outside the glass are the ash slats, modifying the bulk of the new volume, because it seems to change as you move round it, from an almost solid thing to one in which delicately incised slits make it practically shimmer. Stacked stairs form an intermediate zone between old and new. Bridges fly across the voids over stair flights to meet the beautiful old (Schinkel-restored) slender brick Gothic mullions of the nave windows. An extraordinarily elegant stainless steel detail that reinforces the brick allows modern opening lights to rotate round the mullions without harming them.

Spaces inside the new ship are acoustically and thermally separate from the old nave: temporal affairs do not compromise the spiritual. The place is a metaphor of a decent society, in which church and state are separate but symbiotically and symbolically interwoven.

Architect

Klaus Block Architect, Berlin

Design team

Klaus Block, Susanne Gunther, Heike Simon, Siegfried Casteleyn

Landscape planning

Gabriel Schultheiss, Thomas Brunsch

Structural engineer

Dierks, Babilon & Voigt

Photographs

Ulrich Schwarz