Brandenburg Gate

The images that went around the world:
Hundreds of thousands of people celebrated the unveiling of the restored Brandenburg Gate on the 3rd of October 2002, the Day of German Unification, in Berlin.

To complement the lavish restoration that was befitting for such a monument, the symbol of the capital was also given a completely new, state-of-the-art lighting system. Amongst other fittings, the lighting designers at Kardorff Ingenieure, design office in Berlin also chose 70 Tesis lens wallwashers for floor installation, fitted with 35W metal halide lamps. These were assigned to the individual columns. Two Parscoop floodlights for 70W metal halide lamps are mounted in each ceiling of the five main passages and illuminate the passage wall surfaces.

ERCO lighting tools thus play a decisive part in a lighting concept whose quality does justice to the great significance of this building.

Constructed from 1788 to 1791 by Carl Gotthard Langhans in the likeness of the Propylaea of Athens, it closes off the Western end of the Unter den Linden street on Pariser Platz.

Height: 26 m, Width: 65 m
Depth of central section with its five passages: 11 m.

The 15 m tall Doric columns hewn from sandstone and fluted in Ionic style have a diameter of 1.75 m at the base.

Following the destruction of the city wall in 1867/1868, Schinkel's student Johann Heinrich Strack added the lower, open colonnades to both sides of the Brandenburg Gate in 1868.

Restoration 1999-2002
Cost: 3.9 million Euro (56,900 hours of work)
In 22 months, the state symbol was statically secured, professionally repaired and cleaned. The work was financed by the Stiftung Denkmalschutz Berlin, Berlin's charity for the protection of monuments
www.stiftung-denkmalschutz-berlin.de

Web-site of the lighting designer:
www.kardorff.de