Église catholique Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune

Église catholique Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune stands in France, a pink sandstone church with the largest dome in Alsace. The Catholic community could no longer share its older namesake church with the Protestants. So this building went up between 1889 and 1893. Its architecture is typical of the Neustadt, the quarter a confident city raised late in the nineteenth century.

Skjold Neckelmann and August Hartel borrowed the rounded arches and solid forms from Rhineland Romanesque basilicas. For the dome they turned to the Renaissance, to models like St Peter's in Rome. That dome spans eighteen and a half metres and rises fifty metres. Step inside and light floods down from it onto an elevated choir circled by an ambulatory. At the centre hangs Eugène Braun's chandelier, an image of the New Jerusalem with its twelve gates and twelve apostles. Théophile Klem's cylindrical pulpit rests on six columns, with lions holding them up from below. Human heads peer from the capitals, and Byzantine mosaics glint across its surfaces.

In the choir, broad panels show scenes from the life of Jesus. To the right stands Henri Waderé's Mystic Rose, a statue in Carrara marble.