Johannes Meiner (1867–1941) ran a photographic studio in Zurich’s Metropol House, working across all genres: portraits, architecture, urban views, advertising. His speciality was stereoscopy — a format whose square constraint, once reframed, fits naturally into the Karo. His plates document Zurich between approximately 1890 and 1920, and are today held at the Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich, the institution in collaboration with which this selection was assembled by Ylva Meyer.
The Stadttheater was designed by the Viennese firm Fellner & Helmer — specialists in theatre construction across Central Europe, responsible for over fifty buildings of this type — and opened on 1 October 1891 with a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin. The building had originally been designed for Krakow; the plans were adapted and reused for Zurich in a matter of months, following the destruction of the previous Actientheater in a fire on New Year’s Eve 1889. The result is nearly identical in structure to the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, completed three years later. The Fellner & Helmer practice was simultaneously at work on the Tonhalle, a few hundred metres along the same lakefront. The view is from the Utoquai, looking toward the building’s lakeside facade. Construction rubble in the foreground is consistent with the ongoing reshaping of Zurich’s quai embankments during this period.
What Meiner frames is not the building alone. Four workers occupy the foreground — seated on debris, at rest, one turned away from the camera, another looking directly into the lens. The Stadttheater fills the background with the same descriptive precision Meiner brought to any architectural subject. The institution and the labour surrounding it share the frame without comment.
The plate
Stereoscopic glass slide selected from the Johannes Meiner holdings at the Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich. Titled “Zürich, Stadttheater, vom Utoquai her.” Dated 1900–1910. The building was renamed Opernhaus Zürich in 1964 and remains in use today.
