Komische Oper — Berlin-Mitte

Three buildings meet without touching. A relief-panelled front at the left edge; behind it a block with every window boarded shut; and rising from below a taut plane of sheeting, stretched on a grid of wooden battens — the only surface here that looks like architecture and isn’t. Between them, turquoise, doing as much work as any of the walls.

The colour is not the buildings’. It is shifted afterwards — a decision, not a record. What the camera found was the geometry and the light crossing it; what I changed was the temperature at which you read them.

An opera house seen from the side nobody photographs. The relief panels at the left edge belong to one period, the boarded windows behind them to another, and the volume rising from below to a third. None of the three touches the others. Read as planes rather than as buildings, they line up as neatly as a collage.

Photographed on 11 April 2026, at the back of the Komische Oper — closed for rebuilding since 2023, and still under way. Part of Fremde Fassaden, an ongoing series of colour-shifted façades made in Berlin, with detours to Duisburg, Visby and Douglas. See the other works made in Berlin-Mitte.