Remember how I mentioned in passing the other day that Chris and I had gone to the Black Forest on a day trip? The town we went to was Alpirsbach, one of the first towns you come to in the Black Forest when you’re taking the train in that direction from Tübingen.

Alpirsbach doesn’t actually have that much to see, truth be told. But, it has a beer factory museum, which makes Alpirsbach-brand beer. We drank the beer at lunch in a restaurant in town, but we skipped the guided tour of the brewery museum in favor the guided tour of the old Alpirsbach Abbey. The abbey has some of the best preserved Romanesque architecture in Germany; it was consecrated in 1099.

And it’s probably the only Romanesque church around that boasts a modern hovercraft inside.

OK, well, in truth it’s a modern organ, not a hovercraft. Built in 2008 to replace the old organ which was falling apart, it was 16 years in the planning and construction. It’s part modern sculpture — designed with an art deco sensibility, IMHO — and part impressive  40-ft tall modern organ which has 2,182 different pipes. Very striking – and very photogenic, as you’ll note in all the photos I’ve included from various angles below.

But because it’s so modern and out-of-sync with the rest of the decorations in the church, the design set off a huge debate within the congregation. One faction wanted this organ to be built front and center as the show piece in the church, which would allow them to offer concerts and other special events with the organ as the showcase.

However, the traditionalists didn’t want to disturb the overall feel of the 900+ year old church architecture, and therefore they wanted to stick the organ over on the side, out-of-the-way, where it wasn’t visible as you entered the church.

The solution: do both. Position the organ on the side of the church for everyday usage, but allow it to be moved into that central showpiece spot for concerts. Everybody liked that plan, but there was one small problem: the organ weighs almost 17 tons. That’s not exactly easy to move.

Enter the “hovercraft.”

The people who built the organ explain on their website that the organ is designed with air-cushions on the bottom. When the folks in the church want to move the organ, they pump air into the cushions to raise the organ ever-so-slightly above the ground. The organ then floats/glides across the floor the new position. A lot of work went in to retrofitting the flooring, etc. in the 900 year-old church to enable this ultra-modern mobile organ design.

I like it!

Anyway, while we actually took the guided tour of the entire church,  I took more photos of the organ than of anything else we saw. I’ve included a selection of photos from the inside and outside of the Alpirsbach Abbey below; it’s an “unguided photo tour” which will should you might selected highlights from  the Abbey. I think the photos are fairly self-explanatory. You’ll be able to tell that I really liked the perspective of the organ’s design when viewed flipped upside down and/or sideways, but there are also some of the organ in its proper orientation, even if I didn’t think that was necessarily its most photogenic side. 😉

I should note that according to the tour guide,  no one knows why one of the tombs by the altar has the skeleton figure on it, but it was odd and intriguing, so I took a photo of it. I also don’t know why there’s a huge wooden sculpture of a cello out in the gardens – the gardens were not on the tour.

FWIW, though, that shot of the cello and the Abbey is the “postcard shot” in Alpirsbach, at least as far as I could tell.

Enjoy.