KARL FRIEDRICH

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

 The Royal Guardhouse ("Neue" Königliche Wache, 1816) was at

the east end of Under den Linden, adjacent to the Baroque
Arsenal and diagonally across from the eighteenth-century
Kronprinzenpalais where Friedrich Wilhelm III actually resided.
Here the obvious functional relationship between the Palace,
Royal Guardhouse, and Arsenal was enriched by an expressive
use of the classical vocabulary.
 The classical idiom of the Kronprinzenpalais was domestic, if
palatial, while the imposing block of the Arsenal was dressed in a
sober Tuscan Doric order above a rusticated ground story, with
sculptural decoration in the form of trophies and captive warrior
heads.
 The Royal Guardhouse has an even more military character: the
projecting corners give it something of the appearance of a
Roman castrum, while the pedimental sculpture of the Greek
Doric portico represents a battle scene presided over by a
goddess of Victory with smaller "victories" replacing the abstract
triglyphs in the frieze below
THE NATIONAL THEATRE “Schauspielhaus”
 Schinkel's Theatre was built to replace an earlier (1800) building by
Langhans which had been destroyed by fire in 1817. For reasons of
economy the King requested that the new building make use of the
surviving foundations, though Schinkel managed to rotate the axis of
the Theatre 90 degrees so that its main entrance was from the
center of the Gendamenmarkt on the east and recessed between
the two churches.
 Chinked chose to design the entrance to his Theatre as a temple-front
portico placed far enough back so as not to compete with the side
porticos of the churches but rather to help unify the elongated square
through the repetition of similarly-scaled hexastyle porticos. On the
other hand Schinkel distinguished his "Temple of the Muses" from the
two churches by the Apollonian theme of the sculptural decoration and
the use of the Ionic order (the columns were taken over from the
previous Theatre). As at the Guardhouse, his use of the classical idiom
is free and imaginative rather than archaeological and the wall here has
been replaced by a reticulated screen of small pilasters articulated at
the corners by colossal ones.
THE MUSEUM ("Alte" Museum am
Lustgarten
 ) Lustgarten was one of the
The Museum am
earliest buildings specifically designed for the
public display of works of art, not as
sumptuous decoration in an aristocratic
palace, but arranged according to medium,
period, and place of origin, with an eye
towards art's civilizing effect (Bildung) on the
nation. Long discussed, the project to make
the royal collections readily available to
artists, scholars, and the public had received
added impetus when it became increasingly
difficult during the Napoleonic era for young
artists to make the heretofore virtually
obligatory trip to Italy.
 The original intention was to house several
departments in the one Museum: heavy
sculpture was to be on the first floor--large
pieces in the top-lit central rotunda and
smaller items in the surrounding wings;
paintings were to be in the second floor north
gallery with other minor departments to east
and west of the rotunda and staircase.
 A monumental collonade of Ionic columns
creates the facade of this prominent museum
that was built opposite the king's palace. This
created a fine public garden with the palace, the
cathedral and the museum on three sides and
bounded by the river on the fourth. The palace
was demolished after the Second World War.
The building is placed on a large plinth partially
as a damp barrier and for dramatic impact. It
also provided office accommodation and
storage and the internal rooms are lit by
basement windows on the other facades.
 The row of eighteen columns created a long
Stoa which originally displayed paintings by
Schinkel (which were completed by others after
his death). These have since been destroyed.
The two bronze sculptures that adorn the
monumental flight of steps are by August Kiss
and Hubert Wolff. So originally, the visitor to the
museum would have their visual senses
assaulted by art and architecture even before
they entered the building.
 A five bay opening with four
more Ionic columns leads to the
central vestibule. The interior of
the building contains two
courtyards as well as a
magnificent central drum and
rotunda. This was based on the
Pantheon and was where the
most treasured works were
displayed. In postwar
reconstruction, the dimensions
of the drum was reduced but its
discovery still surprises as it is
not visible from the exterior.
 With the National Theatre (Schauspielhaus, 1819-1821; 1823) and
the Museum ("Alte" Museum am Lustgarten, 1823-1830), the
relationship with surrounding buildings was not only one of position
and scale but highly symbolic.
 Flanked in the Gendarmenmarkt by the two eighteenth-century
churches which Frederick the Great had commissioned Carl von
Gontard to build--or enlarge--in 1780-1785 for the Calvinist and
Huguenot communities, the Theatre is a temple of the muses where
the classics of German drama were performed with a belief in their
spiritually uplifting character.
 Both Theatre and Museum are examples of the "spilt religion" typical
of the Romantic era when men worshipped at the shrines of Culture;
and if the entrance colonnade of the Museum is closer to a Greek
stoa than it is to a temple, it nevertheless provides a reverential
setting for the display of works of art somewhat in the manner of cult
objects.
 Schinkel wished to master materials and technology in order to make
them serve his artistic purposes, rather than become enslaved by them
in a merely utilitarian process.
THE KONZERTHAUS BERLIN
 The Konzerthaus Berlin (once called the
Schauspielhaus Berlin) is a concert hall
situated in the Gendarmenmarkt square
of central Berlin. Since 1994 it has been
the seat of the major German orchestra
Konzerthausorchester Berlin.

 The building's predecessor, the National-

Theater, was destroyed by fire in 1817. It
had been designed by Carl Gotthard
Langhans and inaugurated on January 1,
1802. The hall was redesigned by
Karl Friedrich Schinkel between 1818 and
1821, and the new inauguration on
June 18, 1821 featured the premier of
Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der
Freischütz. Other works that have
premiered at the Konzerthaus include
Undine by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1816),
Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist (1876),
and Iphigenie in Delphi by Gerhart
Hauptmann (1941).
 The vast majority of Schinkel's domestic designs in and around Berlin were
remodeling of older buildings, and the situation was even more constraining
when he had for clients members of the royal family.
 The high flying, and free wheeling, architectural phantasies of the crown prince,
who fancied himself an amateur architect, had to be tactfully refined by Schinkel.
 Since his student days with David and Friedrich Gilly, Schinkel had been familiar
with the undressed brick architecture of the Middle Ages in Brandenburg and
East Prussia.
 On his first Italian trip he had admired the medieval and early Renaissance brick
architecture of Bologna and Ferrara, and on a trip of 1816 the Roman basilica in
Trier and the continuing brick building tradition of Holland.
 By the 1830s his extensive travels and the experience of such buildings as the
Feilner House, the Friedrich-Werdersche Kirche (1824-1831) and the lighthouse
at Arkona (1825) had given him a certain mastery in the use of brick and terra
cotta which culminated in the School of Architecture (Bauakademie, or
Allgemeine Bauschule, 1831-1835) and the remarkable, though unexecuted,
projects for a royal library (1835 and 1838).
 There were a lot of buildings in which Schinkel's participation was largely
supervisory, or merely part of his civil responsibilities in the Baudeputation.
 On the other hand it includes a number of unexecuted projects for which he
apparently had a special fondness, such as the classical scheme for the
Friedrich-Werdersche Kirche which had to be put aside when the crown prince
decided that a brick building in the Gothic style would be closer in character to
the medieval churches of the old city.
 A full understanding of Schinkel's theory of architecture may
remain impossible.
 Some of his more frequently quoted remarks should be
understood as the musings of an inexperienced youth, as, for
example, the statement contained in the memorandum on the
Queen Luise Mausoleum that "the art of the Middle Ages is from
the beginning higher in its principles than Antiquity.“
 The fragments of his long-projected "Architektonisches
Lehrbuch" have been the subject of much discussion.
 Schinkel died on 9 October 1841 after a long and debilitating
illness.
CONCLUSION
 Schinkel lived during a period of transition, a period when the
conventions of the Baroque could no longer be accepted and a variety
of new tasks arising from the social and industrial revolutions demanded
new solutions.
 The generation of Loos, Behrens, and the young Mies was living in a
period of transition, a period when the conventions of late nineteenth-
century historicism were no longer acceptable and new demands were
being placed on architects. To them it was Schinkel's reticence and
understatement, his refinement of detail, and his clarity and coherence
of plan and elevation that seemed most congenial.
 It is Schinkel's judicious balance of technological progress and historical
continuity, of the will of the architect and the expectations of client and
public, of the imposing presence of individual buildings and the
deference to urban and natural context, and--most of all--his balance of
function and poetry that seem most noteworthy.
 One argument is very clear. "Utility is the fundamental principle of all
building," but utility and construction remain "dry and rigid" without two
equally important elements: "the historic and the poetic." To blend these
four elements successfully requires feeling in addition to reason.