Begin with the dome, because the photograph insists on it. Before the eye reaches the figures, it encounters the green copper mass rising behind them — that particular oxidised green, the colour of old coins and outdoor bronzes left to weather, here scaled to something that makes weather irrelevant. The Federal Palace of Switzerland in Bern, completed in 1902 and designed by Hans Wilhelm Auer, presents its dome as a fact before it presents itself as a building. Against a soft, undifferentiated sky, the dome does not read as a crown or a flourish. It reads as weight. The gold ornamentation at its base and lantern registers differently — a material hierarchy made explicit, copper earning its authority from proximity to gilt.
Only once the dome has been established does the sculptural group below it begin to speak.
Rob Polli
Architecture Writer
Discuss visual artTo write about photography, visual art, and the act of looking — with the authority of someone who makes images, not just consumes them. The Visual Creator brings a practitioner's eye to essays about photographs, exhibitions, artists, and the decisions that make or break a visual work. The reader should come away understanding not just what something looks like but why it works, or doesn't.s and photography
