Parish Church Steyr-Ennsleite

The Roman Catholic parish church of Steyr-Ennsleite is located in the Upper Austrian town of Steyr’s Ennsleite district.Josef der Arbeiter parish church is located in the Steyr deanery of the Diocese of Linz.Historic sites include the church and the vicarage, which functions as a pastoral care center.

The “Neustift Chapel” in the old Ramingstrasse operated as a place of worship for Steyr residents until 1915.It was demolished during the building of the new Steyr armaments facility and was to be rebuilt elsewhere.This did not happen despite repeated pleas until the diocesan ordinariate determined that “instead of the same in Ennsleiten, in a suitable place that would easily allow for a possible later enlargement, a modest Catholic church, at least one chapel, in which mass is said, can” be erected.The arms factory should take over or encourage the construction.

In 1933, after protracted negotiations, a block of land was made available for the construction of an emergency church and a children’s home.However, construction could not begin due to the February uprising in 1934.Following the civil war, the children’s friends’ assets were confiscated, and the Ennsleite home was made available to the church.As a result, the parish acquired the property and exchanged it for the one that was originally purchased.The bond between the staff had been poisoned by the confiscation of the children’s house they had created.The church was accused of enriching itself with property from the labor movement.

With Austria’s takeover in 1938, the parish’s standing worsened.As a result, the kindergarten was soon closed.Five teenage National Socialists robbed the emergency church on the 14th and 15th of January 1939, which was then hijacked by the NSDAP and used as a HJ home.

Services were resumed in the building after the war, but the church remained unpopular among the workers owing to its history.As a consequence, the building was ultimately restored to its rightful owners, and the investigation into the cause commenced.Finally, in May 1958, talks for a plot of land on Arbeiterstrasse were concluded, and preliminary plans for the parish hall were submitted.The diocesan council favored the preliminary plan of Johann Georg Gsteu and working group 4 over that of Bruno Schwamberger.

The groundbreaking ceremony for the building was held on September 14, 1959. Two years later, the parish hall, vicarage, and youth center were completed and opened on October 14, 1961, before being consecrated on December 10, 1961.The parish hall served as an emergency church for the next few years.

The church and kindergarten, the second phase of development, were slated to commence at the end of 1966.The architects Johann Georg Gsteu and working group 4 from Vienna were chosen again after multiple changes to the plan and much consideration.Hugo Bruneder, a graduate engineer, was assigned responsibility for technical site management.The groundbreaking ceremony for the church took place in September 1968.

In the first half of 1970, the church was practically finished, allowing the first Holy Mass to be sung in the new church on June 7, 1970.However, some furnishings, such as holy water fonts, baptismal fonts, and the tabernacle column, remained missing.On September 20th, the bell bearer was crucified, and the church was consecrated on October 4th, 1970, in the presence of the architects, by diocesan bishop Franz Salesius Zauner, following a sermon by Engelbert Schwarzbauer.

An X-support is the recurring supporting element in this construction.Both vertical and horizontal pressures are absorbed.The spatial framework is formed by connecting six of these supports to a concrete frame.The course of the internal forces is duplicated by the longitudinal beams, which are broader where the supporting crosses exist.

The exterior shell, which was originally meant to be entirely composed of Profilit glass, has no load-bearing purpose and suggests in the architectural concept that the room boundaries can be changed in the medium or long term.