Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (March 13, 1781 - October 9, 1841) German architect and painter. Schinkel was the most prominent architect of classicism 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 "Monk looking at the sea" (Der Mönch am Meer) at the 1810 Berlin art exhibition he decided that he would never reach such a mastership in painting and definitely turned to architecture. After France's defeat, Schinkel oversaw the Prussian Building Commission. In this position, he was not only responsible for reshaping the (still relatively unspectacular) Berlin into a representative capital for Prussia, but also oversaw projects in the Prussian territories spanning from the Rhine lands in the West to Königsberg in the East.

Old Museum (June 2003).

Schinkel's style, in his most productive period, is defined by a return to classical Greek architecture, probably in an attempt to turn away from the Roman style that was linked to the earlier French occupiers. His most famous buildings are found in and around Berlin. These include the Schauspielhaus (1819-1821) at the Gendarmenmarkt, which replaced the earlier theater that was destroyed by fire in 1817, and the "Old" Museum (see photo) on Museum Island (1823-1830).

Schinkel, however, is noted as much for his theoretical work and his architectual drafts as for the relatively few buildings that were actually executed. Maybe his merits are best shown in his unexecuted plans for the transformation of the Acropolis into a royal palace 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).

It has been speculated, however, that due to the difficult political circumstances – French occupation and later the dependency on less-than-capable Prussian kings – 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 his true potential exhibited by his sketches.

External links

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

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