Room of silence

» Interdenominational prayer room with a view of Lake Wolletz in Brandenburg, Germany

» Jan Kleihues, Kleihues + Kleihues Architekten from Berlin, designed the pavilion. It was built in 2021 on behalf of the town of Angermünde and supported by the Fiege family

» The roofless pavilion consists of two offset and interlocking U-shaped wall structures that form three rooms. There is a birch tree in the centre room

» To the west of the Room of Silence lies the Wolletz manor house, to the east the GLG clinic Wolletz, and to the south the Wolletz lake

An unroofed brick pavilion stands in a clearing on the northern shore of Lake Wolletz in the Wolletz district of Angermünde. Completed in 2021, the building, designed by Berlin architect Prof Jan Kleihues, is intended to offer an openly accessible space for contemplation and reflection. Architect Prof Heike Hanada describes this special place as follows:

At a time when, on the one hand, a fixed religious and ethical anchorage for the inhabitants of a community is increasingly in a process of dissolution and, on the other hand, our relationship and understanding of landscape and nature is being called into question, it seems obvious to seek our relationship to the natural phenomena of our existence in the proximity of nature.

The proposed positioning of a space-creating, accessible sculpture in a clearing with a view of the lake offers the ideal conditions for this. The sculptural body is conceived as an enclosing spatial sequence that protects a space with solid brick walls, from which the viewer can seek the view of the landscape across the lake alone and with himself.

Similar to the experience in a Zen Buddhist tea hut or in an eremitic cell, the phenomena of nature can be experienced more deeply through the abstract, delimiting framework of an enclosed space. The light reflections of the sun on the horizontally structured brick wall, the changing cloudy sky, the sounds of the leaves in the wind – the path leads to a place of silence and transcendence.