Architecture
Karl Friedrich Schinkel: a Universal Man (V & A, till 27 October)
The importance of being earnest
Alan Powers
German culture has often repelled the English by its earnestness. English intellec- tual life in the early 19th century suffered in the long run from a refusal to come to terms with German philosophy which could be said to have sent us down the road of empiricism and isolation. Byron spoke for many of us faced with German idealism when he wrote of Coleridge, 'Explaining Metaphysics to the nationdl wish he would explain his Explanation'. Yet the resulting inferiority is shown in the absurd Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch whose toilsome Biblical researches were revealed at last to have been years behind the work of Ger- mans he had never even heard of.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) offers an example of seriousness in archi- tecture hardly matched among his British contemporaries. Scholars have long been intimate with his work, but this exhibition and the catalogue edited by Michael Snodin (Yale University Press, £30) offer scholars and public alike an insight into great architecture through drawings, paint- ings and objects, many of them ravishingly beautiful in themselves.
Schinkel's sense of the high calling of architecture, his awareness of philosophical and political thought and his immense industry did not, as they might have done, produce dull buildings. His royal palaces and villas and his paradigms of a museum, a theatre and an academic building are
fired with imagination. Schinkel was inspired to become an architect by his con- tact with the short-lived genius Friedrich Gilly, otherwise he might have been a painter. Gilly's famous perspective of the monument to Frederick the Great of 1797 is in the exhibition, a talismanic object in the history of architecture. Schinkel's skill in painting and drawing enriched his travels to Italy and gave him employment as a panorama painter during the Napoleonic years when there was little architecture to be made in Prussia. His attitude to his life's work was bound up with the national renewal created from the ashes of defeat. In this romantic period, it is not surprising that he followed Goethe in associating the Gothic style with the national spirit of Ger- many, but in this style he visualised more than he built. Classical forms offered a more resonant and pliable repertory and Schinkel was one of a handful of architects since the Renaissance to have created archetypal classical buildings. Nowhere illustrates the difference between dull, incompetent classicism and great architecture better than the park of Sans Souci at Potsdam. One can leave the tedious late baroque schloss behind, with its overloaded early neo-classical outbuild- ings, and cross a landscape which takes on the character of an idealised English park as one approaches Charlottenhof, the lusthaus built for Schinkel's greatest royal patron, the Crown Prince Friedrich Wil- helm. Last summer, with Potsdam hardly yet awake to freedom, there were teenage girls raking hay in the fields and a bucolic young man cutting a thicket of bushes with a sickle to complete the pastoral impres- sion. — have they been given modern equipment by now? Charlottenhof is a per- fect blend of architecture, landscape and interior decoration, an image of enlight- ened despotism which its owner liked to call 'Siam' in recognition of the supposed Rousseauist paradise of the East. As well as the tiny schloss, Schinkel built the Ital-
ianate gardener's house and Roman baths nearby beside a little lake, which provide some of the most memorable images in the exhibition. It is the sort of building that Humphrey Repton or John Nash might have imagined, but they would not have been able to impose on it so much meaning without loss of charm and spontaneity. Its appeal, whether in life or in Schinkel's dreamlike engravings, is nonetheless imme- diate and uncomplicated. The catalogue note does not exaggerate in saying of Schinkel and his garden designer Lenne that 'the system they created out of ele- ments of landscaping, spatial organisation, architecture and horticulture, including the way these communicate visually and func- tionally, emerged as a blueprint for social harmony and a vision of a world of reason.'
Among Schinkel's incidental activities was the design of sets for Die ZauberflOte in 1815, the best that Mozart has ever been given. That opera's mixture of seriousness and comedy, creating a rounded view of mankind, accords well with the descriptions of Schinkel's character, 'the most complete image of genuine humanity'. If Papageno• were meant to live in the gardener's house, Sarastro would be well served by the Altes Museum, a temple to the arts whose ionic colonnade Schinkel defended against accu- sations of 'useless extravagance' by claim- ing that he sought to accommodate 'the higher purpose' of a museum, not merely its 'trivial function' of displaying pictures. We cannot blame the architect for some of the scenes subsequently enacted before this building, which in reality is far from domi- neering in scale. Within view of the muse- um's portico stood, until its needless demolition in 1961, Schinkel's late master- piece, the Bauakademie, a brick building of independence and. individuality, neither classic nor gothic; housing the architectural school which perpetuated Schinkel's ideals for years to follow.
The exhibition represents every aspect of Schinkel's varied career, including furni- Schinkel's halianate gardener's cottage in the grounds of the Okirlottenhof at Potsdam ture and decorative objects, and is the best of its kind mounted by the V & A for many years. The catalogue, with seven essays by scholars and full illustrations and entries, does honour to its subject for the first time in English.
At the Goethe Institut (50 Princes Gate, SW7, till 20 September) is a small comple- mentary exhibition on Schinkel's journey to England, Scotland and Wales in 1826. It reveals his great sensitivity to landscape and his ambiguous response to the mills and warehouses of Manchester. 'It is a strange and terrible scene: enormous hulks of buildings thrown up by foremen without any architectural thought, just the basest requirements and built of red brick.' Although these buildings influenced Schinkel's Bauakademie, he aimed to transform what Auden called 'the Trivial Unhappy Unjust City' into a place of beau- ty, harmony and justice. His success in doing this is persuasive proof of the intel- lectual and ethical role of architecture, and the danger of trivialising it.
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