Colour-Shifted Façades in Berlin-Mitte

Mitte is the opposite case to Kreuzberg. Here the buildings have names, architects and opening dates, and the temptation is to photograph them as monuments. These three frames do the reverse: they take buildings that were designed to be recognised, and decline to recognise them.

The Komische Oper picture is made of three buildings that never touch. A relief-panelled front at the left edge, behind it a block with every window boarded shut, and rising from below a third volume belonging to neither. Stand at the right distance and the depth collapses. What is left is a set of planes stacked against each other like paper.

The other two are the same building, seen from different distances: Florian Nagler Architekten’s Archaeological House at Petriplatz, which sits over the excavated foundations of the medieval Petrikirche. From the corner it reads as two cubes, one stepped down in front of the other. Closer in, it is a slab pushed out over a strip of glass that stops in mid-air. Neither picture would help anyone find the building. Both are true to how it is made: flat surfaces, hard joints, nothing decorative.

Two of these frames were photographed on the same morning in April 2026, a short walk apart. That is usually how it goes — not a shoot, a walk in which the light happens to be right twice.

The colour is shifted afterwards, a decision rather than a record. Part of Fremde Fassaden; each work is available as a signed, numbered archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308.