Figure 5. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: project for Neue Wache, Berlin, 1816
But if Gothic projects form a more important part of his production on canvas, and also on paper, in the first decades of the century than is the case with any other architect of the period, even in England, Schinkel made his formal architectural debut as a Grecian and a rationalist. Named by Frederick William III State architect in 1815, his project of the next year for the Neue Wache (Figure [5]), Unter den Linden, facing Frederick the Great’s opera house, is especially notable in the use of square piers—a Ledolcian extreme of rationalist simplification—beneath the Grecian pediment. His intense Romanticism also reveals itself in the heads of Pergamenian extravagance that writhe forth from the frieze above. Not surprisingly, in the building as executed, and happily still extant, Greek Doric columns replace the square piers. But the broad plain members that frame the cubic mass behind and, above all, the superb proportions of the whole reveal a surer hand than any other architect of the day in Germany possessed. The contrast with Klenze’s Glyptothek, begun the same year, is notable.
Schinkel’s Berlin Cathedral, as rebuilt in 1817-22 beside the Baroque Schloss of Andreas Schlüter, was a modest work and none too successful; its replacement in 1894-1905 by the enormous Neo-Baroque structure of Julius Raschdorf was no great loss.
There followed after the Cathedral a work of much greater scale, the Berlin Schauspielhaus, designed in 1818 and built in 1819-21 (Plate [12]). Here the complexity of the mass diminishes somewhat the clarity of the geometrical order in the separate parts; but Schinkel’s rationalistic handling of Grecian elements is nowhere better seen than in the articulation of the attic by means of a ‘pilastrade’ of small antae or the reticulated organization of the walls of the side wings. The interior of the auditorium boldly combines very simple and heavily scaled wall elements with very delicately designed iron supports for the ranges of boxes and galleries.
Characteristic of the many-sidedness of Schinkel’s talent, if very much smaller and intrinsically less happy, is the War Memorial, also of 1819-21, on the Kreuzberg in Berlin. This is a Gothic shrine of the most lacy and linear design, 111 feet high and entirely executed in cast iron.
The Singakademie in Berlin of 1822 and a large house in Charlottenburg for the banker Behrend, on the other hand, are very accomplished exercises in a rigidly Classical mode such as his French contemporaries were currently essaying with markedly less elegance of proportion. The Zivilcasino in Potsdam, begun the next year, where an awkward site forced—or perhaps merely justified—an asymmetrical juxtaposition of the parts, illustrated an aspect of Schinkel’s talent that is particularly significant to his twentieth-century admirers: the imposition of coherent geometrical order upon an edifice markedly irregular in its massing. This was something the English were only playing at in these years when they designed Picturesque Italian Villas such as Nash’s Cronkhill or loosely composed Castellated Mansions such as Gwrych (Plate [49]).
It is characteristic of Romantic Classicism that Schinkel’s masterpiece—and, with Soane’s later Bank interiors, the masterpiece of the period—should be a museum. The Altes Museum, designed in 1823 and built in 1824-8, faces the Schloss across the Lustgarten, to which Schinkel’s just completed Schlossbrücke gave a dignified new approach. The Museum quite outranked his rather undistinguished cathedral; yet at first glance it may seem one of the least original and most tamely archaeological of Romantic Classical buildings (Plate [13]). Substituting for the paradigm of the pedimented peripteral temple that of the stoa, Schinkel evidently counted on the prestige of a giant Grecian order to impress his contemporaries, quite as Brongniart had done at the Paris Bourse (Plate [8B]). But the Museum retains the admiration of a twentieth century usually bored, and even shocked, by such stylophily because of the extraordinary logic and elegance of its total organization.
The frontal plane of superbly detailed Ionic columns is not weak at the corners, as colonnades seen against the light generally are, for here spur walls ending in antae firmly enframe the long, unbroken range. And if this frontal columnar plane is unbroken—and also seems to deny by its giant scale the fact that this is a two-storey structure—within the dark of the portico, made darker and more Romantic by a richly coloured mural designed by Schinkel and executed under the direction of Peter Cornelius, one soon becomes aware of a recessed oblong where a double flight of stairs leads to the upper storey. Moreover, lest this façade be read, like a stoa, as no more than a portico, there rises over the centre, still farther to the rear, a rectangular attic.
Figure 6. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: Berlin, Altes Museum, 1824-8 section