(1781-1841), German architect.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel was the leading architect in Berlin during the first half of the nineteenth century, one of the most productive and innovative artistic minds of his era, and arguably one of the founders of the modern tradition in architecture as such. Schinkel’s importance as a teacher and role model for architecture is as important as his work as designer and builder of several monumental structures in Berlin and in Prussia generally. He established a distinctive style of design and construction that combined earlier traditions of building, especially from classical antiquity and from the gothic Middle Ages, but also in several instances introduced a programmatically modernist design that in function and in materials points ahead to central features of twentieth-century architecture. Schinkel’s reputation and his influence remain widespread, as does a universal respect and admiration for his life, his personality, and his work in general.
Schinkel was born in the town of Neuruppen, located in the region of Brandenburg, north of Berlin. Several years after the death of his father in a fire that broke out in his home town when Karl Friedrich was only seven, he moved with his mother and several siblings to Berlin (in 1794), where he attended the ‘‘Zum grauen Kloster’’ gymnasium, the leading school of the city, which he left in 1798. Schinkel’s interest in architecture was aroused through contact with David Gilly (1748-1808), in particular in response to a design for a memorial for Frederick the Great designed by Gilly’s son Friedrich (1772-1800) and exhibited in 1797. The monument was never built and the younger Gilly, who had become a close friend of Schinkel, died in 1800, the same year in which Schinkel’s mother also died. Schinkel’s apprenticeship years included an extended trip to Italy (18031805). Schinkel produced a number of monumental landscape paintings during these early years, which attracted wide interest. Usually located in an imaginary medieval setting with ornate gothic castles, cathedrals, and cities, these paintings demonstrate a distinct architectural vision. The pervasive influence of Romanticism is everywhere apparent.
EARLY CAREER
Following the defeat of Prussia at the hands of the emperor Napoleon I (r. 1804-1814/15) in 1806 and the subsequent occupation of Berlin by the French army, Schinkel had little opportunity to practice the craft of architecture. For the next decade he supported himself primarily through his painting and through set designs for the theater, where he achieved remarkable success. His designs for a production of Mozart’s Magic Flute in the opera house Unter den Linden in 1815 remain perhaps the most famous ever conceived for that work. In 1809 he married Susanne Berger (17821861), who subsequently gave birth to three daughters and a son (Marie, 1810; Susanne, 1811; Raphael, 1813; and Elisabeth, 1822). Schinkel’s work as a painter and theater designer quickly attracted the interest of the Prussian court, where he was appointed an architectural consultant (Oberbauassessor) as early as 1810, and in the following year he became a member of the Academy of Arts.
ARCHITECTURE
Schinkel’s breakthrough as an architect occurred soon after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, when he was commissioned by the Prussian king Frederick William III (r. 1797-1840) to design a New Guardhouse (Neue Wache) on Unter den Linden, adjacent to the newly opened university. This modest, yet elegant classical structure adapted the model of a Roman Castrum with an entry consisting of six Doric columns. The building has seen various uses over the years, especially during the Nazi and communist eras, but in the early twenty-first century serves as a memorial for all the victims of political oppression and the destruction of wars, with an open inner space containing the powerful Pieta by Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945).
Largely in response to the success of this first public building, Schinkel was appointed privy counsellor for public works and professor of architecture. The great era of his career as the leading architect of Berlin extended through the following two decades. His most significant monumental designs were the new Royal Theater (Schauspiel-haus) on the Gendarmenmarkt, built on the ruins of the preceding structure, which burned to the ground in 1817 (completed in 1821), and the Museum of Art (now called the Altes Museum), located at the northern end of the Royal Gardens (Lustgarten) opposite the great baroque city castle designed in the seventeenth century by Andreas Schluter (1664-1714). Schinkel’s museum combined several classical elements—including a long row of Ionic columns along the front of the building, a staircase with open landing ascending to the second level (where the collection of paintings was housed), and a central rotunda modeled on the Pantheon in Rome, where the collection of antique sculptures was arranged in a circle around the periphery of the hall. These two monuments of high culture—theater and museum—established the distinctive profile of Schinkel’s plan for Berlin as an Athens on the Spree River.
A number of other projects by Schinkel demonstrate innovative construction techniques and a protomodernist functional style. He designed the monument to the Wars of Liberation from Napoleon on Kreuzberg, using cast iron with a distinct gothic design (1814). He designed the bridge (Schlossbrucke) from the boulevard Unter den Linden to the island where the royal castle was located, placed with sculptures on either side commemorating heroic figures in the arms of mythological divinities (1821-1824). Schinkel also redesigned the estate in Tegel of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of the university in 1810 and the chief proponent of a neoclassical architectural style modeled on ancient Greece. The design of Schloss Tegel (1820-1824), however, demonstrates Schinkel’s skill at combining traditional architectural features, including the grace of Italian villas, with a simplicity and symmetry of form that looked ahead to his modernist tendencies. Even more striking in simplicity and elegance is the pavilion (now called the Schinkel Pavilion, 18251830), located next to the Charlottenburg Palace, intended as a quiet retreat for the royal residents from that much more monumental structure. At the king’s request it was modeled on the Villa Reale Chiatamone in Naples. The pavilion constitutes a perfect cube with rooms and balconies arranged in a symmetrical placement around the inner space on two levels in balanced proportions. Even today this building seems astonishing in its simplicity and elegance of design.
A view of the Altes Museum, Berlin. Aquatint by Johann Daniel Laurens after a drawing by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1831.
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY
The Friedrichswerder Church is perhaps Schin-kel’s most successful blending of the gothic revival and modern functional style of all the several churches he designed. It still stands and now functions as a museum in celebration of Schinkel’s career and the culture of his time in Berlin. The Academy of Architecture (Bauakademie, 1832-1835) deserves to be celebrated as the most perfect fulfillment of Schinkel’s modernist tendencies—a four-story, square ground plan that also constituted a perfect cube with an external facade consisting of industrially produced terracotta tiles. The inner rooms were arranged around a central courtyard with a variety of uses indicated for the instruction and training of future architects, as also for the offices of the central building authority (Oberbaudeputation). Schinkel himself occupied the top floor as atelier and residence, and after his death his drawings and writings were preserved there in his memory as a museum, subsequently
Moved several times until finally located in the new Kupferstichkabinett. In 1960, although the Bauakademie survived the bombings quite intact and was being renovated, the East German regime dynamited and removed it. In the early twenty-first century there is some hope that the Bauakademie may be reconstructed to honor Schinkel’s memory.
DESIGN POSSIBILITIES
Schinkel’s importance as a teacher and source of innovation in architecture is also measured by the plans and designs he prepared for buildings never built and for hypothetical architectural possibilities. He published these designs at various intervals during his career (from 1819 to 1840) under the title Sammlung architektonischer EntwUrfe (Collection of Architectural Designs). Schinkel also drafted a comprehensive plan for the inner city of Berlin, which remained uncompleted for lack of funding from the king and the Prussian court. Issues of funding plagued Schinkel throughout his career and led to compromise and the abandonment of many projects. Nonetheless his designs in themselves provide a sense of his unique vision and the ambition for building that he brought to his career. Schinkel also designed a great diversity of furniture and decorative objects and domestic crafts, which supplement his architectural vision of a classical modernism. A project for a comprehensive textbook of architecture (Architektonisches Lehrbuch), which Schinkel worked on for many years, remained uncompleted at his death. Since many of the buildings and decorative objects designed by Schinkel do not survive, the documentary record provided by his drawings and engravings is all the more important for evaluating his achievement.
In the final phase of his career Schinkel was commissioned to build and renovate several buildings and royal residences in and near Potsdam, especially Schloss Charlottenhof, along with the court gardener’s house and roman baths (18261829), the cavalier house on the Pfaueninsel (1824-1826), and Schloss Glienecke and Schloss Babelsberg (1834-1849; completed after Schin-kel’s death). Finally, Schinkel prepared elaborate plans with detailed illustrations for two projects that extended far beyond the limits of the possible and remain as utopian visions of an architectural grandeur symbolizing Schinkel’s genius: the Royal Palace on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece (1834), and Orianda Castle on Yalta in the Crimea for the Prussian king Frederick William Ill’s daughter, who was married to Tsar Nicholas I (r. 18251855) of Russia (1838).
In 1840 Schinkel collapsed into an unconscious state that lasted for more than a year until his death on 9 October 1841. His funeral procession and burial in the Dorotheenstrasse cemetery were attended by thousands of devoted followers. The legacy of this artistic genius remains unique in the annals of architecture, both in practice and in theory. His achievement in various fields of artistic endeavor is impressive, and the importance of the buildings he designed is acknowledged universally after nearly two centuries. The distinctive cultural style of the Romantic era in Berlin is almost entirely the legacy of Schinkel, despite the destruction and catastrophes of the twentieth century. Karl Friedrich
Schinkel fully deserves his reputation as the central precursor of modern architecture and as one of the most important architects who ever lived.
See also Berlin; Prussia; Romanticism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ohff, Heinz. Karl Friedrich Schinkel oder die Schonheit in Preufien. Munich, 1997.
Pundt, Hermann G. Schinkel’s Berlin: A Study in Environmental Planning. Cambridge, Mass., 1972.
Snodin, Michael. Karl Friedrich Schinkel: A Universal Man. New Haven, Conn., 1991.
Steffens, Martin. K. F. Schinkel, 1781-1841: An Architect in the Service of Beauty. Cologne and Los Angeles, 2003.
Cyrus Hamlin
World History
