A good game is to name structures called after their architects. Let me get you started in Paris with Charles Garnier’s opera house and Gustave Eiffel’s tower and in Vicenza, the Basilica Palladiana by Andrea Palladio.
That’s the easy ones ticked off. I was unaware that the Semperoper in Dresden is the work of Gottfried Semper. He also designed part of the Zwinger Palace and the Semper Synagogue. The synagogue was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938 and a new synagogue built adjacent to the site in 2001.
This is perhaps a good moment to muse on the almost complete destruction of the centre of Dresden in WW II. Architecturally at least, the city benefitted from becoming part of East Germany as no serious attempt to reconstruct the historic centre was made until after re-unification. Dresden literally rose from rubble in the first decade of this century which is why so many tourists of my generation have only just discovered it.
One of Semper’s quirkiest constructions was a barricade for the May uprising of 1848 in Dresden. Despite his fame as an architect he was exiled for his part in the rebellion and, like so many refugees, ended up for a short while in London. Unfortunately he received no major commissions but he did design the Duke of Wellington’s funeral carriage. It’s a twelve ton, six wheeler, that is on display at Stratfield Saye.
He also designed Richard Wagner’s baton, which cannot have been very testing, but a more substantial legacy is the Bayreuth Festspielhaus which Wagner based on Semper’s plans for an opera house in Munich. Semper died aged 76 in Rome in 1879 where he is buried in the Protestant cemetery; somewhere to visit next time.
