On 3 August 1830 the Altes Museum opened in Berlin, on the Lustgarten facing the royal palace. From outside it is a long temple: eighteen Ionic columns on a podium, a flight of steps as wide as the whole façade. Inside, behind the colonnade, the visitor finds a rotunda covered by a coffered dome, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, and on either side two great staircases from which, through the columns, one looks out at the square. It is the first Prussian public museum and one of the first in Europe designed from the start as a museum. Its author is Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841).
Schinkel was born in Neuruppin and trained in Berlin with Friedrich Gilly, who died young and whose drawings for a monument to Frederick the Great marked him. After a journey to Italy in 1803–05 he worked as a painter of panoramas and stage designer, and designed the sets for The Magic Flute (1816), with the celebrated starry sky of the Queen of the Night. When Prussia, after Napoleon's defeat, needed to give its state a face, he was put in charge of public building. In twenty years he designed the Neue Wache (1816–18), the Theatre (Schauspielhaus, 1818–21), the Altes Museum, churches, bridges, palaces.
Two languages for one state
Those who know Schinkel only through Berlin's Greek temples risk missing half his work. In the years of the wars against Napoleon, as national feeling grew in Germany, Schinkel painted large pictures of imaginary Gothic cathedrals, suspended between romantic landscapes and dramatic skies, and designed a gigantic commemorative cathedral of liberation, never built. In those years Gothic was read as the German national style, and Schinkel used it without hesitation. On the Kreuzberg hill, south of Berlin, he built between 1818 and 1821 the national monument to the Wars of Liberation: a Gothic spire in cast iron, then a brand-new industrial material, cast in the Prussian royal foundry. It is from this hill, and the cross that crowns the monument, that the whole Berlin district would take its name. Cast iron made it possible to mass-produce complex Gothic details that would have taken years of work in stone. Cast iron made it possible to mass-produce complex Gothic details that would have taken years of work in stone.
A few years later, in the Friedrichswerder Church (1824–1831), a short walk from the Altes Museum, Schinkel used Gothic in exposed brick, inspired by the medieval churches of northern Germany and the chapels of English colleges. The client had also asked for a classical version, and Schinkel prepared several: for him style was a choice tied to a building's character and function, not a creed. This pragmatism is the key to understanding the Bauakademie: before building it, Schinkel had already found that brick could be a noble, precise material, capable of a quality equal to that of stone.
His public role went far beyond Berlin's great monuments. As a senior official of the Prussian building administration, Schinkel examined and corrected the designs for public buildings across the kingdom, from village churches to town halls, and signed or revised hundreds of them. For Berlin's growing suburbs, in the early 1830s, he designed a group of economical churches, the so-called suburban churches, built with simple volumes and humble materials to respond quickly to population growth. It is an under-celebrated aspect of his work, but an important one: Schinkel saw architecture as a service of the State, to be applied with the same care to a great museum and to a neighbourhood church on a tight budget.
His experience as a painter and stage designer also shapes the way he designed. In the panoramas he painted as a young man for the Berlin public, and in the sets for The Magic Flute, Schinkel learned to control viewpoint, depth and light, and to construct an image capable of moving someone looking at it from a precise position. In his buildings this sensibility shows in the way he studies views: the view from the Altes Museum's loggia towards the Lustgarten, the sequence of spaces at Charlottenhof, the appearance of the Neue Wache along the avenue. Schinkel designed like a director, thinking about what someone moving through the space would see. It is a lesson that still holds today for anyone designing a public building or space. It is a lesson that still holds today for anyone designing a public building or space.
The museum as an institution
Before Schinkel, royal collections were visited in palaces. The Altes Museum invents a type: a public building dedicated to art, with a clear route (entrance, rotunda, galleries, staircases), conceived for the education of citizens more than for the pleasure of the prince. The central rotunda, with ancient statues arranged beneath the dome, works as a solemn vestibule, a space that prepares the visit. The model is so effective that in the course of the nineteenth century it would be taken up by museums throughout Europe and America.
The building's form is also studied in relation to the city. The long colonnade is not the façade of a closed temple but a stoa, an open portico like those of Greek squares, facing the royal palace and the cathedral across the Lustgarten and turning the square into a civic space. From the landing of the staircase, on the first floor, visitors turn and look at the city through the columns: the museum does not shut out the outside world, it frames it. In the following decades other museums rose behind the Altes Museum, eventually forming Museum Island, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The nearest, Friedrich August Stüler's Neues Museum, destroyed in the war, was restored and completed in 2009 by David Chipperfield.
Schinkel knew that an architect's influence also travels through images. Between 1819 and 1840 he published, in instalments, a collection of his own designs, the Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe, with engraved plates of high quality: plans, elevations, perspectives, often with figures animating the spaces. It was one of the means by which his way of designing spread far beyond Berlin, to Germany, Scandinavia, Russia and the United States, and for generations architecture students learned classicism from those plates.
The journey to England
In 1826 Schinkel made a long journey through France and Britain, commissioned by the Prussian government to study museums and industry. In London he visited the British Museum, still under construction; but it was above all the industrial cities of the North, such as Manchester, that struck him. In his diary he recorded his astonishment and unease at huge brick mills, seven and eight storeys high, built by foremen without any architectural ambition, purely out of necessity: gigantic, repetitive buildings without ornament. At the same time he studied closely the cast-iron structures, the fireproof vaulted floors, the lighting and heating systems. It was from this encounter with industrial construction that the idea arose of a rational architecture that nonetheless did not give up quality: exactly what the Bauakademie would try to be.
The Bauakademie: brick as structure
His most radical work is less well known. Between 1832 and 1836 Schinkel built in Berlin the Bauakademie, the Prussian school of architecture: a cube of red brick with four equal sides, windows laid out in a regular grid and simple terracotta friezes. There is no portico, no column. The façade shows the structure: the piers, the bays, the windows. Schinkel declares he wants to make a building in which every element has a constructional meaning. Twentieth-century modernists would read it as a precursor, and not wrongly: the logic of a modular, repetitive building, honest about its materials, is already all there.
The Bauakademie suffered war damage and was demolished in 1962 by the East German government to make way for a ministerial building. Since then its reconstruction has been a recurring theme in the Berlin debate: between 2001 and 2004 a rebuilt brick corner and a scaffold wrapped in full-size printed sheets of the façade were erected, and in recent years the federal government has funded a reconstruction project. The problem is not technical but theoretical, and is the same as that of the Neues Museum: do you rebuild what was destroyed, or accept the loss?
Technically, the Bauakademie was also an innovative building. The internal structure was a system of brick piers and shallow vaults, organised on a regular grid, which allowed the spaces of the school, the offices of the Prussian building administration and, on the ground floor, shops, whose rent helped finance the building, to be arranged freely. The façades, identical on all four sides, declared this grid on the outside. The terracotta decorations beneath the windows depicted the history of architecture and the craft of building: an iconographic programme that turned the building into a lesson for the students who used it. Schinkel himself lived there in the last years of his life, in an apartment on the top floor, and died there in 1841: the building in which he had summed up his idea of architecture was also his home.
A master of the moderns
Schinkel's influence on Germany long remained alive in institutional form too. Since 1855 the Berlin association of architects and engineers has held an annual competition named after him, the Schinkel-Wettbewerb, reserved for young designers, with the award ceremony on 13 March, his birthday. But his most famous heir is probably Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who studied his works at length and admired their clarity. When, in the 1960s, Mies built the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, a large steel-and-glass pavilion set on a stone plinth, many critics read it as a homage to the Altes Museum: the same relationship between podium and roof, the same unified and solemn space, translated into the materials of the 20th century.
For visitors to Berlin, Schinkel's buildings can be seen on a single walk. Start from the Neue Wache on Unter den Linden, since 1993 the Federal Republic's central memorial to the victims of war and dictatorship, with at its centre an enlarged copy of Käthe Kollwitz's Pietà beneath an opening in the ceiling. A little further on are the Altes Museum and the Friedrichswerder Church, and on the Gendarmenmarkt the Schauspielhaus, rebuilt after the war and now a concert hall. In Potsdam, in Sanssouci Park, Schloss Charlottenhof and the nearby Roman Baths show a different Schinkel, more intimate, in which architecture and garden merge into a landscape inspired by the Italian villas he had drawn on his travels.