Petri House — Window, Berlin-Mitte

A slab pushes out over a strip of glass and stops in mid-air. Above it and below it, two flat planes; between them a band of mullions and reflections, sunk in shadow. To the right, nothing at all — an empty field runs to the edge and takes half the picture with it.

The colour is not the building’s. 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.

A detail argues differently from a whole. The corner view of this building still reads as architecture; this frame has given that up. What is left is a horizontal, a shadow under it, and a large area of nothing — proportions that would hold as a painting with the building taken out of them.

A detail of the Archaeological House at Petriplatz in Berlin-Mitte — the same building that stands whole in Archaeological House, Petriplatz, completed in 2024 to a design by Florian Nagler Architekten. 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.