Specials "Window for moving light" - Dom in Greifswald

Greifswald’s Dom St. Nikolai faces east, so its choir windows only catch direct sunlight in the morning. Olafur Eliasson’s fix was to make the sun work overtime.

His Fenster für bewegtes Licht (“Window for moving light”) is built from 3,383 hand-blown pieces of glass in 65 shades, set in about 75 m² of leaded glazing. The colours run from warm reds and yellows at the bottom to a transparent blue at the top, and the pattern grows from diamonds and squares into overlapping circles. Behind the glass, small mirrors inside the choir throw the colour back into the church.

The cheeky part is on a neighbouring rooftop. A 1.5-metre heliostat, a mirror that tracks the sun, keeps bouncing sunlight at the window long after the sun has moved on. The church fills with shifting colour all year, in the afternoon too, and Eliasson hoped the unexpected light would make visitors stop and wonder where exactly they were standing.

Why build it? It’s a birthday present for Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th, from his home town. The light is inspired by how Friedrich painted skies. The window also finishes a job the church started in the 1830s, when the romantic redesign of the interior planned coloured choir windows that were never made. The congregation first asked Eliasson’s studio in 2019, and the window was unveiled in April 2024.

The album shows the finished glass, the sunlight doing its tricks and the details up close. Go and look.