Sven Schubert and his team are in the final stages of their work on the Inner Portal II of the Berlin City Palace. He speaks with STEIN about this major project.
The corner cartouche and three portals for the Berlin City Palace
File folder after file folder lines the shelves in Sven Schubert’s office in Dresden, and they all bear the same label: Berlin Palace. The palace also dominates the walls of the company owner’s office. No wonder—he has been overseeing several phases of the massive reconstruction project since 2014. “The groundbreaking took place in 2013; our company began in 2014 with the initial sampling and the procurement of the raw blocks.” Schubert uses sandstone from Posta and Reinhardtsdorf—“Cottasandstone is best for sculptural work, but it doesn’t meet the required compressive strength for the reconstruction.”
Sven Schubert won several partial contracts: With his company, he was responsible for fabricating the corner cartouche based on the model, as well as for the production and installation of exterior portals II and IV and interior portal II. His employees are currently installing the final pieces on the latter. “What’s particularly exciting about this portal is that we’re incorporating old parts into it.” About 20 stonemasons worked for him at the City Palace. And two robots. He acquired the first one in 2014 and the second in 2016. “Aside from the fact that a project like this offers financial security, it’s also the largest in our company’s history to date.” And not just because of the scope of the contract: the company used over a thousand cubic meters of sandstone. When Schubert considers the scale of it all, he can’t help but marvel: “The heaviest raw block for the corner cartouche weighed 19.6 metric tons! It’s the largest—albeit composite—single sculptural element in the entire castle. The colossal columns at Portal II, for example, are also gigantic in their dimensions—I’ve never seen larger ones…”
A puzzle of historical photographs, knowledge of architectural styles—and opinions
It’s not hard to believe; after all, the diameter of the column shaft alone is 1.50 meters. The column drums are 1.70 meters high, crowned by two-part Corinthian capitals measuring 1.60 meters. One column: a good 40 cubic meters of material.
Every few months, a commission of experts visited the construction site in Dresden to discuss the individual sculptural pieces: “At times, we discussed every single fingertip. That sounds exhausting—and it is—but it’s also wonderful and extraordinary.” Because only a few photographs of the original palace have survived, the reconstruction is an approximation, pieced together from photos, knowledge of the architectural style common at the time—and the opinions of those involved at the construction site.
The debates surrounding the reconstruction are subsiding
As construction progresses and more scaffolding comes down, Schubert observes, “the opposition also begins to fade.” He himself has never quite been able to understand the debate anyway: “First of all, this is a very valuable project because it gives a lot of model builders, sculptors, and stonemasons the opportunity to work in their true calling for a long time.” Second, Schubert finds every tear shed for the Palace of the Republic somewhat hypocritical—“after all, the palace had to make way for it in the first place.”
He also doesn’t share the criticism of the concrete cube—it was built to create new spatial dimensions and to accommodate modern museum culture. “The natural stone facade is cantilevered in front of it. In that respect, the shell of the building isn’t really relevant.”
Completion of a Giant
The reconstruction is well on schedule—a welcome positive example in times of sprawling major construction sites in Germany. The palace is set to be inaugurated at the end of 2019. In a few days, Sven Schubert and his team will have completed their part of the reconstruction. The project has helped him and his team grow in various ways over the past few years: “With facades like this, you naturally become a general contractor, handling everything from masonry to reinforced concrete work.” In addition, thanks to the commission, Schubert was able to train one of his stonemason apprentices to become a sculptor. Sculptor Ralf Knie worked with the robot for the first time, and stonemason Edgar Scheidwig became a 3D digitization expert for the corner cartouche project. Schubert is fairly certain that, after the Berlin City Palace, no comparable project will follow in Europe anytime soon.
