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SCHINKEL
INTRODUCTION
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, German architect and painter was the most
prominent architect of neoclassicism in Prussia.
Schinkel was born in Neuruppin in the Margraviate of Brandenburg.
He started earning his living as a painter.
He enjoyed almost every honor his native Prussia and contemporary
Europe could bestow upon an architect.
Schinkel's style, in his most productive period, is defined by a turn to
Greek rather than Imperial Roman architecture, an attempt to turn away
from the style that was linked to the recent French occupiers.
Schinkel, however, is noted as much for his theoretical work and his
architectural drafts as for the relatively few buildings that were actually
executed to his designs.
Some of his merits are best shown in his unexecuted plans for the
transformation of the Athenian Acropolis into a royal palace for the new
Kingdom of Greece and for the erection of the Orianda Palace in the
Crimea. He also designed the famed Iron Cross medal of Prussia, and
later Germany.
The absolutism of the Prussian monarchy subjected Schinkel to the financial
austerity of Friedrich Wilhelm III and to the mental instability of Friedrich
Wilhelm lV, later (1857-1858) to be declared officially insane and replaced
by his brother, the future Kaiser Wilhelm I.
Perhaps most unfortunate, the fact that Schinkel died before Germany's
phenomenal industrialization really got underway meant that his concern
with new industrial materials and methods had limited scope for realization
and remained largely theoretical.
It is tempting to speculate as to how Schinkel's thoughtful and judicious
attitude towards the developing technology, combined with his elegant
restraint as a designer, would have affected the course of architecture had
he lived on to mid-century rather than die at the relatively early age of sixty.
His most famous buildings are found in and around Berlin. These include
Neue Wache (1816–1818), the Schauspielhaus (1819–1821) at the
Gendarmenmarkt, which replaced the earlier theater that was destroyed by
fire in 1817, and the Altes Museum (old museum, see photo) on
Museum Island (1823–1830).
Later, Schinkel would move away from classicism altogether, embracing the
Neo-Gothic in his Friedrichswerder Church (1824–1831). Schinkel's
Bauakademie (1832–1836), his most innovative building of all, eschewed
historicist conventions and seemed to point the way to a clean-lined
"modernist" architecture that would become prominent in Germany only
toward the beginning of the 20th century.
HIS LIFE
The student days under the influence of Friedrich Gilly and early international
neoclassicism when Nature and Reason were still thought to be synonymous
and best expressed by elementary geometrical forms (as in the Steinmeyer
House and the Pomona Temple);
The High Romantic phase (1806-1815) with its concern for the victory of spirit
over matter and "what ties us to the superhuman--to God" (most clearly seen in
the imaginary architecture of his paintings and stage designs, but also in the
"Gothic" projects);
The mature neoclassical phase (1815-1826) during which his mastery of Greek,
Roman, and Italianate forms was such that he could use them with freedom and
originality to express contemporary content (as in the Museum am Lustgarten
and Charlottenhof);
The late phase (1827-1841) when his eclecticism was at its most syncretic and
comes closest to a "modern" mode capable of raising ordinary, even utilitarian,
buildings to the level of architecture (the Bauakademie and the Kaufhaus);
The "Higher Architecture" (1834-1841) in which the experienced practitioner, his
health failing, entered a world beyond the exigencies of everyday practice (the
Royal Palace on the Acropolis and Orianda).
HIS LIFE WITH ARCHITECTURE
At the age of sixteen, Schinkel was so fascinated by an exhibition of the
beautifully rendered project drawings by the young Friedrich Gilly (1772-
1800) that he decided on a career as architect.
In March 1798, while the young Gilly was traveling abroad, Schinkel
began studies. When Friedrich Gilly returned, a close friendship
developed between the two men, and by 1799 Schinkel was living in the
Gilly household, using the library the young Gilly had assembled on his
trip and copying his drawings and projects.
Following the untimely death of Friedrich Gilly in 1800, Schinkel
completed some of his friend's projects and undertook a few of his own.
The town house of the master carpenter and contractor Steinmeyer at
Friedrichstrasse 103 (demolished 1892) is usually thought to be a
design of Gilly which Schinkel executed, and the strong contrast
between drafted masonry and large unarticulated areas of smooth
stucco typical of Gilly seem to support this view.
Decoration was placed as an accent to relieve otherwise severe planes
rather than integrated into a tectonic system as it was in the mature
work of Schinkel.
The Pomona Temple, an Ionic garden pavilion on the Pfingstberg
near Potsdam, was Schinkel's own design, as were several
buildings for country estates.
This handful of building projects and his work designing furniture
and porcelain earned him enough money to finance a study trip
in 1803. During the next two years Schinkel visited Italy,
including Naples and Sicily, passing through Dresden, Prague,
and Vienna on the way, with a stop in Paris on the return journey.
In 1805 and 1806, France occupied all Prussian lands west of
the Elbe. The Royal family left Berlin, ceding much of its territory
to France. Schinkel had to supplement his limited opportunities
to build with work as a stage designer and painter of romantic
landscapes.
Schinkel had seen the 1810 exhibition of Friedrich's painting at
the Berlin Akademie der Künste and was clearly influenced by
them. His own landscapes show a similar romantic view of
nature as "God speaking to the human heart," although
Schinkel's paintings remain closer to the classical landscape of
Koch.
In 1809, he married to Susanne Berger, a merchant's daughter
from Stettin.
By 1810 Schinkel was a member of the Academy and Geheimer
Oberbauassessor in the Oberbaudeputation with responsibility not only for
making financial estimates but for expressing an opinion on the plans for
such court or state buildings.
The 1809 panorama had attracted the attention of the royal family and
Schinkel had been introduced to Queen Luise. Soon afterwards he was
commissioned to redecorate the Queen's bedroom at Charlottenburg Palace
and responded with elegant neo-classical furniture of pearwood and rose-
colored muslin for the upholstery and walls.
Even before the return of the royal family to Berlin Schinkel had redesigned
part of the Kronprinzenpalais for King Friedrich Wilhelm III, and fifteen years
later in 1824 Schinkel designed the remodeling of a suite of rooms in the
Stadtschloss (the "Historischen Räume") for Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm
on the occasion of his betrothal to Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria. For the
rest of his career Schinkel continued to serve the royal family, rebuilding and
furnishing old palaces in the city and, with the assistance of the landscape
architect Peter Joseph Lenné, transforming their country estates.
Following the death of the popular Queen Luise that same year he
submitted a design for a mausoleum in the form of a Gothic hall church.
The accompanying memorandum contains a rhapsodic description of the
mausoleum in which Schinkel makes it clear that he believes architectural
form can and should express an idea.
After Napoleon's defeat, Schinkel oversaw the Prussian Building
Commission. In this position, he was not only responsible for reshaping the
still relatively unspectacular city of Berlin into a representative capital for
Prussia, but also oversaw projects in the expanded Prussian territories
spanning from the Rhineland in the West to Königsberg in the East.
Even after the allied victory of 1815 and until around 1828 Schinkel
continued to work as a stage designer, achieving in these imaginary settings
an ideal integration of architecture and nature.
The most impressive of these were the 1815/16 designs for Mozart's Magic
Flute (Die Zauberflöte) in which the Egyptian locale of the opera gave
Schinkel the opportunity to reconstruct what was considered by his
generation to have been the earliest form of monumental architecture.
In an event, Berlin's most important war memorial was the Gothic cross
Schinkel designed in 1817/18 for the Tempelhofer Berg (subsequently
known as Kreuzberg) with figures by Christian Daniel Rauch, Friedrich Tieck,
and Ludwig Wichmann. The use of cast iron for this war memorial is
especially significant and can be considered as an example of "iron cross-
ism."
In contrast to Gothic monuments, the three prominently sited public buildings
which Schinkel was commissioned to build in central Berlin during his early
maturity, the Royal Guardhouse, the National Theatre and the Museum, all
returned to the neoclassical style.
THE ROYAL GUARDHOUSE