Belvedere auf dem Klausberg

In Potsdam's Sanssouci Park, the Belvedere auf dem Klausberg rises as a round building beneath a domed roof. Frederick the Great had it built on the Klausberg between 1770 and 1772, his final architectural project in the park. Georg Christian Unger designed it from a drawing by the Italian archaeologist Francesco Bianchini. Bianchini tried to reconstruct the imperial palace on Rome's Palatine Hill, and the round plan echoes an ancient fountain temple.

A two-level platform rings the building, with twenty ionic columns below and twenty corinthian columns above. Twenty statues of divinities in sandstone stand around the dome, carved in several sculptors' workshops. Inside, two rooms sit one above the other, and only a staircase reaches the upper one. The restored upper room pairs soft green marble walls with gilt plaster ornaments. Karl Christian Wilhelm Baron and Friedrich Wilhelm Bock painted its ceiling with clouds and birds, reconstructed from an old photograph. The lower room once held walls of white Silesian marble and vases of red jasper. Grey marble slabs on its floor formed an eight-pointed star, a motif that ran on into the vaulted ceiling.

Fire gutted the building in the final days of the Second World War, and no one has restored the lower room since. The Messerschmitt Foundation later brought the structure back as its contribution to German reunification. It was the first belvedere in Potsdam, and it began a tradition of architecturally designed lookout points in the royal residential city. From the platform, you look out across Sanssouci Park and the surrounding landscape of Potsdam.