Dresden, September 21, 1869. A fire, started by a gas chandelier, devours in a few hours the Saxon court opera house, opened barely thirteen years before. The city, which had already mourned the destruction of the same architect's first theatre (a fire in 1869, after the first building had stood since 1841), finds itself having to rebuild the same theatre for the second time, on the same square, and calls again on the man who had designed it the first time — even though, at that moment, he is a political exile who cannot set foot in Saxony. He is Gottfried Semper, and the theatre that still bears his name, the Semperoper, will be rebuilt from a distance, by correspondence, with his son Manfred directing the site in his place.
A revolutionary who studies Greek temples
Semper is born in Hamburg in 1803 and studies mathematics before turning to architecture, a training that stays with him for life: in his buildings proportion is calculated, not intuited. In the 1830s he travels to Greece and Italy to study the ancient temples up close, and returns with a discovery that scandalises the purists of neoclassicism: Greek temples, which the nineteenth century imagined as pure white marble, were in fact painted in bright colours. In 1834 he publishes an essay on this ancient polychromy, and in 1860 develops the idea into a broader treatise, Der Stil (Style), in which he argues that architectural forms arise from craft techniques — weaving, ceramics, carpentry, masonry — not from an abstract ideal of beauty.
In 1834 he becomes professor at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and builds the first court opera house (1838–41), a building in Italian Renaissance style that makes him famous throughout Germany. But Semper is also a revolutionary: in May 1849 he actively takes part in the Dresden uprising, fighting on the barricades alongside the composer Richard Wagner and the anarchist Bakunin. After the revolt's defeat he is forced to flee: first to Paris, then to London, where he works on the 1851 Great Exhibition and teaches at the newly founded School of Design at the South Kensington Museum, today the Victoria and Albert Museum.
A theatre rebuilt from afar
The amnesty that would have let him return to Saxony never fully arrives: when the theatre burns in 1869, Semper is living in Vienna, working on the great Ringstrasse project, the boulevard replacing the city walls with museums, theatres and public buildings. He designs the new Dresden opera house from a distance, through correspondence and drawings sent by post, while his son Manfred, also an architect, physically directs the site. The theatre reopens in 1878, in an Italian Renaissance style even richer than the first, with a curved façade and a statue of Faust and Mephistopheles over the entrance — a tribute to Goethe. Semper himself never sees it finished in person: he dies in Rome in 1879, a year after its inauguration, having never returned to Dresden.
The theatre survives its own history in an almost stubborn way. Damaged in the February 1945 bombing of Dresden, which razed much of the city to the ground, it remains an empty shell for decades under communist East Germany. It is rebuilt, with great philological care, and reopens on February 13, 1985, exactly forty years after the bombing, with a performance of Weber's Der Freischütz, the same opera that had inaugurated Semper's first theatre in 1841. Few buildings have such a direct relationship between destruction and rebirth, repeated three times in their history.
Vienna's Ring and the theoretical legacy
In Vienna, Semper works on the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Naturhistorisches Museum, twin palaces on the Ring, and on the plan (never fully completed) for a great Imperial Forum that was to link the Hofburg to the two museums. He dies before seeing them finished. But his most lasting legacy is not a building: it is an idea. The principle that architectural form arises from technique and material, not from a style imposed from outside, is taken up by later generations of architects, from Otto Wagner, his ideal successor in Vienna, to the theorists of the Modern Movement, who, while rejecting Semper's historicism, share his underlying question: what does the form of a building really come from?
A temple to science in Zurich
Between Dresden and Vienna, Semper also lives through a long London exile. Having fled Dresden after the 1849 uprising, he passes through Paris and then settles in London, where he writes part of his theoretical treatise and gets involved in organising the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. In the British capital he also takes on a post that seems far from his training as a revolutionary architect: he teaches the principles of decoration at the newly founded South Kensington Museum — today the Victoria and Albert Museum — one of the first public institutions to systematically teach the applied arts, and his manuscript lectures are still kept in the museum's library.
In 1855 the Swiss government offers him a lifelong professorship, and Semper moves to Zurich as director of the new architecture school of the Federal Polytechnic, today ETH Zurich. Here, between 1858 and 1864, he designs the Polytechnic's main building, a great neo-Renaissance palace overlooking the city from the top of a hill, conceived as a true secular temple dedicated to science and technology — the same compositional principle as his theatres, applied to an institution that at the time represented, for the young Swiss Confederation, an investment in its own industrial future. It is the only major public building Semper sees completed entirely under his own direction, without fires or rebuildings: an exception, in his career, almost as much as the Semperoper is the rule.