Friedrich August Stüler
Stüler was a pupil of Schinkel and designed the Neues Museum in Berlin. In Stockholm he designed the Nationalmuseum, one of the first large historicist buildings in Sweden.
Friedrich August Stüler was born in 1800 in Mühlhausen in Thuringia, the son of a clergyman. He studied at the Bauakademie in Berlin and became one of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s closest pupils and collaborators. Together with other young architects in Schinkel’s circle he worked on Prussian state buildings, and in 1829–1830 he travelled in France and Italy. He was given responsibility for palace buildings in Berlin and became closely associated with the Crown Prince, later King Frederick William IV, who was deeply interested in architecture. When Frederick William became king in 1840, Stüler gained a leading position, and in 1842 he was appointed the king’s architect, responsible for a long series of buildings.
Stüler’s best-known work in Berlin is the Neues Museum, 1843–1855, behind Schinkel’s Altes Museum, where new iron structures were combined with richly decorated galleries for different periods. He also laid the foundations of the plan for the Museum Island and sketched the Nationalgalerie. He designed the dome of the Berlin City Palace, churches, university buildings and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. In Stockholm he won the commission to design the Nationalmuseum, built in 1850–1866 under the direction of Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander. The building has façades in the Venetian and Florentine Renaissance style, a grand staircase and galleries planned for the various art collections. His style was an elegant historicism dominated by the Renaissance.
Stüler died in 1865, the year before the Nationalmuseum opened. The building was Sweden’s first large museum building and one of the first great historicist monuments in Stockholm. It showed how a museum could be organised around a staircase and an ordered sequence of galleries, a model that shaped museums in the 19th century. His collaborator Scholander later became a leading teacher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and carried German historicism forward in Sweden. The Nationalmuseum underwent an extensive renovation in 2013–2018, when Stüler’s original spatial connections and light courts were restored. The Neues Museum in Berlin, badly damaged in the Second World War, was rebuilt by David Chipperfield and reopened in 2009.