Karl Friedrich Schinkel
Schinkel gave Berlin its classical face with the Altes Museum, the Schauspielhaus and the Neue Wache. He also designed in the Gothic style and laid the foundations for a more rational, almost modern architecture. His influence in the Nordic countries was considerable.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel was born in 1781 in Neuruppin in Brandenburg, the son of a clergyman. As a teenager he saw the young architect Friedrich Gilly’s design for a monument to Frederick the Great and decided to become an architect. He became a pupil of David and Friedrich Gilly in Berlin and studied at the new Bauakademie. In 1803–1805 he travelled in Italy and France. During the Napoleonic Wars there were few building commissions, and Schinkel earned his living as a painter of Romantic landscapes, panoramas and stage sets, including for Mozart’s The Magic Flute in 1816. In 1810 he joined the Prussian building administration, of which he eventually became head.
After 1815 Schinkel gave Berlin its classical centre. The Neue Wache, 1816–1818, is a guardhouse with a Doric portico, and the Schauspielhaus on the Gendarmenmarkt, 1818–1821, combines an Ionic temple front with rationally ordered façades. The Altes Museum, 1823–1830, on the Lustgarten has a long colonnade in front of a rotunda modelled on the Pantheon and was one of Europe’s first public art museums. The Friedrichswerdersche Kirche is Gothic in brick, and in Potsdam he designed country villas such as Charlottenhof. The Bauakademie, 1832–1836, with its red-brick façades and clear pier system, pointed towards a rational architecture in which the structure itself carried the expression. He also designed furniture and published large collections of his designs.
Schinkel died in 1841, worn out by work. He is regarded as Germany’s foremost architect of the 19th century, and his school, with pupils such as Friedrich August Stüler and Ludwig Persius, shaped Prussia for generations. In the 20th century he was seen as a forerunner of modernism: Peter Behrens and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe studied his clear volumes and proportions. His influence in the Nordic countries was considerable. Carl Ludvig Engel, who had trained in Berlin, gave Helsinki a classical centre in a similar spirit, and Stüler designed the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Swedish architects travelled to Berlin to see his buildings, and the Nordic Classicism of the 1920s took up his austere, elegant formal language once again.