Title-page collage combining the Belvedere's colonnaded rotunda with a Watteau-style courtly scene and painted botanical branches, previewing the project's tableau-vivant theme.

INTRAVEDERE

FIELD OF WORK
Design Research
Light Design
Projection Mapping
Light Design
Light Design
DELIVERABLES

Concept, Previsualization & Technical Planning

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INTRO

INTRAVEDERE is a 2021 Xenorama concept for the Belvedere am Klausberg in Sanssouci Park, Potsdam — pitched to the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten as a six-week seasonal installation, never commissioned.

The Belvedere, built 1770–72 for Frederick the Great after a supposed Roman model, was burned out by Allied bombing in WWII and partly reconstructed by the 1990s with the destruction deliberately left visible in the ground-floor mosaic. INTRAVEDERE (Italian, "to glimpse dimly") takes that history as its subject: downstairs, a graphic laser continuously retraces the war-destroyed eight-point marble star without ever touching the historic floor, alongside architectural LED lighting in the jasper red of the original stone. Upstairs, one-way-mirror and projection screens around a free-standing "light monolith" turn the room's outward panorama into an inward-facing tableau vivant, echoing Jean-Antoine Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera and the 18th-century fashion for re-enacting such paintings with real bodies. Visitors would never enter either room, only look in through the eight surrounding windows of each floor after dusk.

Key challenges

Working non-invasively inside a UNESCO World Heritage building — no drilling, no touching the historic mosaic floor or ceiling fresco

Reconstructing the war-destroyed mosaic star in light without erasing the visible ruin it commemorates

Staging a viewable-but-unenterable installation, seen only through each floor's eight windows

STATUS

A full technical and cost concept (EUR 43,270 net) was delivered in 2021. The project was not commissioned, and nothing was built — it is kept here as design research: what an inhabited, site-specific media installation for this building could have been.

Fisheye view straight up into the Belvedere's dome, the laser-reconstructed eight-point star at the centre surrounded by a golden ring of light and eight painted window projections.
Fisheye view straight up into the Belvedere's dome, the laser-reconstructed eight-point star at the centre surrounded by a golden ring of light and eight painted window projections.
Interior view through three arched window niches of the upper hall, a visitor's silhouette in the lit central opening between teal-and-white painterly projections.
Interior view through three arched window niches of the upper hall, a visitor's silhouette in the lit central opening between teal-and-white painterly projections.
The same upward dome view in a cooler blue-white palette, showing the reconstructed star and surrounding window projections.
The same upward dome view in a cooler blue-white palette, showing the reconstructed star and surrounding window projections.
The same three-arch interior composition with a warmer teal-and-orange glitch-style projection variant.
The same three-arch interior composition with a warmer teal-and-orange glitch-style projection variant.
CREDITS

Concept: Xenorama