Karl Friedrich Schinkel

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Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (March 13, 1781 – October 9, 1841) was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
architect

Architect

An architect is trained and licenced in planning and designing buildings, and participates in supervising the construction of a building. Etymologically, architect derives from the Latin architectus, itself derived from the Greek arkhitekton , i.e....
and painter.

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Karl Friedrich Schinkel (March 13, 1781 – October 9, 1841) was a German

Germany

Architect

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism is the name given to quite distinct Cultural movement in the Decorative art and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon Western classical art and culture ....
in Prussia

Prussia

Prussia was, most recently, a historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. This state had for centuries substantial influence on Germany and European history....
.

Schinkel was born in Neuruppin

Neuruppin

Neuruppin is a town in Brandenburg, Germany. Located on the shore of the Ruppiner See , it is the capital of the district of Ostprignitz-Ruppin....
in the Margraviate of Brandenburg

Margraviate of Brandenburg

The Margraviate of Brandenburg was a major principality of the Holy Roman Empire from 1157 to 1806. Also known as the March of Brandenburg , it played a pivotal role in the history of Germany and Central Europe....
. He lost his father at the age of six in Neuruppin's disastrous fire. He became a student of Friedrich Gilly

Friedrich Gilly

File:Friedrich Gilly.jpgFile:Friedrich Gilly .jpgFriedrich David Gilly was a Germany architect, the son of the architect David Gilly.Born in Altdamm , Pomerania , he was known as a prodigy and the teacher of the young Karl Friedrich Schinkel....
(1772–1800) (the two became close friends) and his father, David Gilly, in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the Capital of Germany city and one of sixteen States of Germany of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is the country's largest city....
. After returning to Berlin from his first trip to Italy in 1805, he started to earn his living as a painter. Working for the stage he created a star-spangled backdrop for the appearance of the "Königin der Nacht" in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty; at seventeen he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and traveled in search of a better position, always...
's opera The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute

The Magic Flute is an opera in two acts composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue....
, which is even quoted in modern productions of this perennial piece. When he saw Caspar David Friedrich's

Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romanticism Landscape art painter, generally considered the most important of the movement....
painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is an oil painting of 1818 by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich....
at the 1810 Berlin art exhibition he decided that he would never reach such mastery of painting and definitely turned to architecture. 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

Königsberg

K?nigsberg was after World War II in 1946 renamed Kaliningrad by the Soviet Union.The city was the Capital of East Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1945....
in the East.

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. (Thus, he is a noted proponent of the Greek Revival.) His most famous buildings are found in and around Berlin. These include Neue Wache

Neue Wache

The Neue Wache is a building in central Berlin, the capital of Germany. It is located on the north side of the Unter den Linden, a major east-west thoroughfare in the centre of the city....
(1816–1818), the Schauspielhaus

Konzerthaus Berlin

The Konzerthaus Berlin is a concert hall situated on the Gendarmenmarkt square in the central Mitte district of Berlin. Since 1994 it has been the seat of the major German orchestra Konzerthausorchester Berlin....
(1819–1821) at the Gendarmenmarkt

Gendarmenmarkt

The Gendarmenmarkt is a square in Berlin, and the site of the Konzerthaus Berlin and the French Cathedral and German Cathedral. The centre of the Gendarmenmarkt is crowned by a statue of Germany's poet Friedrich Schiller....
, which replaced the earlier theater that was destroyed by fire in 1817, and the Altes Museum

Altes Museum

The Altes Museum , is one of several internationally renowned museums on Berlin's Museum Island in Berlin, Germany. Since restoration work in 1966, it houses the antique collection of the Berlin State Museums....
(old museum, see photo) on Museum Island

Museum Island

Museum Island in Berlin, Germany is the name of the northern half of the Spreeinsel, an island in the Spree river in the centre of the city ....
(1823–1830).

Later, Schinkel would move away from classicism altogether, embracing the Neo-Gothic in his Friedrichswerder Church

Friedrichswerder Church

The Friedrichswerder Church was the first Gothic Revival church built in Berlin, Germany. It was designed by an architect better known for his Neoclassical architecture, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and was built under his direction, 1824-1831....
(1824–1831). Schinkel's Bauakademie

Bauakademie

The Bauakademie in Berlin, Germany, built between 1832 and 1836, is considered one of the forerunners of modern architecture due to its theretofore uncommon use of red brick and the relatively streamlined facade of the building....
(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.

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

Acropolis

Acropolis literally means city on the edge . For purposes of defense, early settlers naturally chose elevated ground, frequently a hill with precipitous sides....
into a royal palace for the new Kingdom of Greece

Kingdom of Greece

The Kingdom of Greece was a state established in 1832 in the London Conference of 1832 by the Great Powers . It was internationally recognized in the Treaty of Constantinople , where it also secured full independence from the Ottoman Empire....
and for the erection of the Orianda Palace in the Crimea

Crimea

Crimea or the Autonomous Republic of Crimea is an autonomous republic of Ukraine located on the northern coast of the Black Sea, occupying a peninsula of the same name....
. These and other designs may be studied in his Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe (1820–1837) and his Werke der höheren Baukunst (1840–1842; 1845–1846). He also designed the famed Iron Cross

Iron Cross

The Iron Cross was a military decoration of the Kingdom of Prussia, and later of Germany, which was established by King Frederick William III of Prussia and first awarded on 10 March 1813 in Breslau ....
medal of Prussia, and later Germany.

It has been speculated, however, that due to the difficult political circumstances – French occupation and the dependency on the Prussian king – and his relatively early death, which prevented him from seeing the explosive German industrialization in the second half of the 19th century, he did not even live up to the true potential exhibited by his sketches.

Literature

Karl Friedrich Schinkel 1781 - 1841: the drama of architecture, ed. by John Zukowsky. With essays by Kurt W. Forster and Wolfgang Pehnt, ISBN 0-86559-105-9.
Jörg Trempler: Schinkels Motive. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-88221-866-4.
Christoph Werner: Schloss am Strom. Die Geschichte vom Leben und Sterben des Baumeisters Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Bertuch-Verlag, Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-937601-11-2.

External links

Rand Carter, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, "The Last Great Architect": http://www.tc.umn.edu/~peikx001/rcessay.htm (also used as a reference)