In 1986, when Gottfried Bohm won the Pritzker Prize, the award was only a few years old, but it was already regarded as the greatest international accolade in architecture. Bohm, the first and only German ever to receive the prize, was honored by the Pritzker committee in part for his work from the 1950s and 60s, which was almost exclusively devoted to the construction and reconstruction of churches. Bohm's Pilgrimage Church in Neviges, Germany (1964-68), for example, is a crystalline ecclesiastical building modeled in exposed concrete, and a beautiful example of Bohm's virtuosity. In Bohm's...