Church Stained Glass Windows?
Poensgen Pushes The Boundaries
Church stained glass windows do not look like this. These four enormous pillars of light are more like walls than the Christian stained glass windows we know and love. Surrounding the altar in light, they make up 560 square metres of glass in total.
On a student trip to Germany in the 1990s, we met Jochem Poensgen, who is here talking about his windows to us. Would you call this religious stained glass? Or is it the location that imbues it with spiritual significance?
Their light and size, combining with the kinetic effect from the three overlapping layers as I walked around the pillars certainly held me in awe.
Rudolf Schwarz built the stained glass church in 1957, originally with glass blocks 
that proved structurally unsound, so Poensgen developed this triple glazed solution to the problem. It has toughened glass on the outside and reeded on the inside. In between, rectangles of reeded and grey cathedral glass are held in place by small pieces of lead. A construction nightmare!
Luckily for Poensgen he didn’t have to make the stain glass window himself.
Light is the most important function of stained glass to Poensgen. The 600 separate panels, each arranged in more than 160 configurations, certainly gave him ample opportunity to play with its transmission.
The effect from inside and outside is totally different, exploiting the two surfaces to the limit.
Resources
If you’re interested in finding out about Jochem Poensgen, he has a website which details his windows project by project. It gives you photos of the windows and the churches, which helps contextualise his work.
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