Asam Church (Asamkirche)
Two brothers built this for themselves — and you can feel every opinionated inch of it.
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Sculptor Egid Quirin and painter Cosmas Damian Asam squeezed a complete Baroque world into a footprint of 22 by 8 metres. Nobody commissioned them, so nobody could stop them. The interior is deliberately engineered: darkest at floor level (worldly suffering), white-and-blue in the middle tier, and blazing with indirect light at the ceiling (God and eternity). The lighting is a structural argument, not decoration.
What to look for
- The cornice above the choir: Trinity figures are lit from behind by a concealed window, glowing with no visible light source.
- Four spiral columns framing the high altar — a direct reference to Bernini's baldachin over St. Peter's tomb in Rome, where the brothers trained.
- Seven confessionals lining the walls, each carved with allegorical scenes.
The façade is built flush into a Sendlingerstraße row of houses and bows only slightly convex outward — watch for it or you will walk straight past.
Asam Church (Asamkirche) is one of 37 sights worth the detour in Munich, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Munich pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Munich
- Allianz ArenaThe world's first stadium with a full color-changing exterior — 75,000 seats wrapped in inflated ETFE plastic panels that can change color across the entire facade.
- Deutsches Museum125,000 objects across 50 fields of science and technology — all on a former coal island in the Isar.
- Nymphenburg PalaceAt 632 metres across, this Baroque summer palace is wider than Versailles — and it started as a birth announcement.
- Alte PinakothekThe gallery that taught Europe how to build a museum — then filled it with five centuries of Old Masters.
- FrauenkircheThe twin towers top out at just over 98 meters — Munich caps the entire city at 99 m, so nothing can overtake them on the skyline.
- Englischer GartenA Massachusetts-born American Loyalist, fleeing Britain after the Revolution, drew up plans for what became one of the world's largest urban parks.