The Church of the Holy Family, now the concert hall of the Kaliningrad Regional Philharmonic — the Catholic Church of the Holy Family (Kirche "Zur heiligen Familie"). The church was laid down in 1904, designed by architect Friedrich Heitmann. Construction took three years, after which the church was consecrated in honor of the Holy Family. The picturesque church is called the "swan song" of architect Heitmann, who oversaw the development of the Amalienau colony and designed churches in East Prussia. The talented architect intended to build a warm family church where the spirit of Jesus Christ and his parents would reign. Heitmann wanted any member of Prussian society to be able to come here — to communicate with God and spend time in prayer.

According to the original design, the church building was supposed to be positioned parallel to the road along its longitudinal axis, with the choir oriented to the east. However, the construction site was expanded, and the church was built symmetrically, which is uncharacteristic of Heitmann’s work. Many elements of the building and its layout were borrowed from order churches, which the architect studied extensively. Red brick was used as the main material. Construction took place from 1904 to 1907. Heitmann believed that the Church of the Holy Family should be a family home where the spirit of Christ and his earthly parents would prevail. The church never held requiem masses, only baptism and wedding ceremonies. Sometimes the church was called the Catherine Church, after the nearby St. Catherine’s Hospital.

Architectural description from Baldur Köster’s book: “From the outside, it is very easy to see all parts of the building: the tall church nave, the choir, the massive tower with its two gables and four annexes at the recessed corners (for sacristies and other rooms). To decorate these cubic forms, Heitmann used a Gothic stepped gable. They were made as side terminations of the pitched roofs of the longitudinal nave and in a reduced form in front of the pitched roofs of the tower. Additionally, similar decorative gables appeared at the four corners of the single-pitched roofs. Numerous stair-step gables, adorned with small pinnacles, add movement to the strict cubic forms; at the top of the tower, the movement intensifies, where pinnacles appear in pairs. The cornices under the roofs and on the tower are quite modest; vertical elements dominate in the pilasters of the gable and the decorative arcades of the tower. It is pointless to look for typical Gothic decorative forms, such as openwork ornamentation, in this building. Overall, this combination of basic simple volumes and also simple and consistently upward-reaching decorative forms creates a structure in the style of the new Gothic, which could not have arisen in the Middle Ages but corresponded to the sense of form at the end of the 19th century.”

The simple portal, made of plain molded stone and slightly recessed inward, leads through a small room before entering the actual vestibule. From here was the entrance to the tall hall church with its five bays. Slender octagonal columns divide the space into a central nave and two side naves of equal height. Above them begin beautiful star-shaped vaults with ribs. The ribs consist of molded red brick. The vault’s springing stones start above the column bases, at the walls above small corbels. The wall surfaces are covered with plaster; the corners of the walls and the triumphal arch are decorated with red brick. These forms are repeated on the slightly elevated choir. To the right and left of the choir were formerly sacristy rooms.

On the eve of the war, in 1939, the church planned to recruit a class of young organists, similar to a Sunday school. None of the eight enrolled boys became musicians; all died serving the Third Reich.

In 1945, the church was damaged and remained abandoned for a long time, gradually deteriorating. In 1980, after extensive reconstruction led by architect Pavel Gorbach, the Kaliningrad Regional Philharmonic was opened there. In 1982, a Czech-made organ with 5 manuals and 3,600 pipes (44 registers) was installed in the concert hall.

Sources:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кирха_Святого_Семейства_(Калининград)