Karl Friedrich Schinkel (
March 13, 1781 -
October 9, 1841) was a
German architect and painter. Schinkel was the most prominent architect of
neoclassicism in
Prussia.
Born in
Neuruppin (
Brandenburg), he lost his father at the age of six in Neuruppin's disastrous fire. He became a student of
Friedrich Gilly (1772-1800) (the two became close friends) and his father, David Gilly, in
Berlin. After returning to Berlin from his first trip to Italy in 1805, he started to earn his living as a painter. When he saw
Caspar David Friedrich's painting "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" at the 1810 Berlin art exhibition he decided that he would never reach such a mastership in 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 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 (1816-1818), the Schauspielhaus (1819-1821) 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 (1823-1830).
Later, Schinkel would move away from classicism altogether, embracing the
Neo-Gothic in his
Friedrichswerder Church (1824-1831). Schinkel's
Bauakademie (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 into a royal palace for the new
Kingdom of Greece and for the erection of the Orianda Palace in the
Crimea. 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 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.
