Alexander Schippel: Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Die Sanierung / The Restoration

The photographer Alexander Schippel (*1979, Berlin) has taken on one of Berlin’s historic architectural monuments: starting in 2011, he spent seven years following the restoration of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, which was carried out by the architect HG Merz, who was commissioned with the job in fall 2010. Schippel’s photographs document the transformation of G. W. von Knobelsdorff’s rococo building-which had already been renovated once during the era of the German Democratic Republic-into a superlative opera house. Attention has been drawn to spectacular interventions in the original building’s structure and minutiae: artfully curving staircases, the columns in the Apollosaal wrapped in plastic sheeting, or precisely detailed panoramas of the ceilings. This monograph, with a foreword by Horst Bredekamp, presents the Berlin opera house in meticulous detail and with a sense of immediacy that no visit to the opera can provide.