INTRODUCTION

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

,German architect and painter was the most prominent architect
of neoclassicism in Prussia.
Schinkel was born in Neuruppinin 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(18161818),
the
Schauspielhaus(18191821)
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(18231830).
Later, Schinkel would move away from classicism altogether, embracing the
Neo-Gothic in
his
Friedrichswerder
Church(18241831).
Schinkel's
Bauakademie(18321836), his most innovative building of all, eschewed
historicist conventions and seemed to point the way to a cleanlined"modernist" architecture that would become prominent in Germany only
toward the beginning of the 20th century.

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 Bau akademie 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).
At the age of sixteen, Schinkel was so fascinated by an exhibition of the
beautifully rendered project drawings by the young Friedrich Gilly (17721800) 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 Pfingstbergnear
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 opportunitiesto 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 Knste 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 rosecolored 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 Rume") 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 Lenn, 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 Knigsberg 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 Zauberflte) 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" Knigliche 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)
The Museum am Lustgarten was one of the earliest buildings specifically
designed for the public display of works of art, not assumptuous 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 floorlarge 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 Kissand 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 reverentiall 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 (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 and1821, and the
new inauguration on June 18,1821 featured the premier of Carl Maria von Weber 's
opera Der Freischtz . 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 GerhartHauptmann(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 terracotta 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 "ArchitektonischesLehrbuch" have been
the subject of much discussion.
Schinkel died on 9 October 1841 after a long and debilitatingillness.
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.