Chapter 2 — The Doctrine of J.-N.-L. Durand and Its Application in… — Architecture by Henry-Russell Hitchcock

Chapter 2 The Doctrine of J.-N.-L. Durand and Its Application in Northern Europe

From the time of Louis XIV France had been unique in possessing a highly organized system of architectural education. Under the aegis of the Académie, students were prepared for professional practice in a way all but unknown elsewhere. To crown their formal training came the opportunity, determined by competition, for the ablest to spend several years of further study as pensionnaires in Rome. The revolutionary years of the 1790s disrupted temporarily the French pattern of architectural education and recurrent wars cut off access to Rome. The Empire, however, early re-established the pattern of higher professional education with only slight and nominal differences. From 1806 on, moreover, the competition projects for the Prix de Rome, including those from as far back as 1791, were handsomely published in a series of volumes.38 Thus the whole international world of architecture could henceforth have ready access to the visual results of official French training in architecture, if not to the actual discipline of the Parisian ateliers.

Napoleon, as an ex-ordnance officer, felt more sympathy with engineers than with architects; hence he established a new École Polytechnique, where architecture was included in the curriculum along with various sciences and technics. J.-N.-L. Durand (1760-1834), the new school’s professor of architecture, published his Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École Polytechnique in two volumes in 1802-5, thus making a fairly complete presentation of the content of French architectural education generally available.39 Recurrent issues of this work down to 1840, of which at least one appeared outside France—in Belgium—allowed this popular treatise to become a sort of bible of Romantic Classicism that retained international authority for a generation and more.

Durand was a pupil of Boullée; but both the text and the plates of his book indicate his capacity for synthesizing and systematizing the diverse strands of theory and practice that had developed in France in the previous forty years. Because of his temperament and background, and a fortiori because he was teaching not in an art academy but in a technical school, Durand is doubtless to be classed within his generation as a proponent of structural rationalism. But he was a much more eclectic one than Soufflot’s disciple Rondelet, from 1795 professor at the École Centrale des Travaux Publics and author of the major treatise on building construction of the period.40 Durand’s lessons incorporated many other aspects of Romantic Classicism, from the pure Classical Revivalism of one wing of the academic world to an eclectic interest in Renaissance and even, like his master Boullée, in certain medieval modes; only the recondite symbolism of Ledoux is absent. In general, one feels in Durand’s case, as always with the second generation of an artistic movement, some loss of intensity at various points where the awkward edges of opposed sources of inspiration were clipped to allow their coherent codification.

After a theoretical introduction concerning the goal of architecture, its structural means, and the general principles to be derived therefrom, Durand deals as a convinced ‘constructor’ with various materials and their proper employment before treating of specific forms and their combination. Only in the second part of his work, concerned with ways of combining architectural elements, do the visual results of his theories become fully evident. There he presents in plan and in elevation various structural systems from trabeated colonnades of Greek and Roman inspiration to arcuated and vaulted forms of Renaissance or even round-arched medieval character. Among his specific examples, ‘vertical combinations’ of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century elements outnumber the strictly Classical paradigms (Figure 2); whole plates, moreover, are given to schemes that are not only generically Italianate, but of Early Christian, Romanesque, or even Gothic, rather than Renaissance, inspiration. Common to most of his examples is the insistent repetition of elements, both horizontally and vertically, and most characteristic is his interest in the varied skylines that central and corner towers can provide, as also in the incorporation of voids in architectural compositions in the form of loggias and pergolas. More monumental façades fronted by temple porticoes are in a minority, although colonnades are frequent enough in his presentation of such specific features as porches, vestibules, halls, galleries, and central spaces. Here are to be found most of the detailed formulas—almost all derived from Boullée and from the Grand Prix projects of the previous decade—which the next generation of architects would follow again and again throughout most of the western world.

In his second volume Durand turns from a consideration of architecture in terms of structural elements to a notably systematic presentation of buildings in terms of their varying functions. First he deals with urbanistic features, including not only bridges, streets, and squares, but also such supposedly essential elements of the ideal classicizing city as triumphal arches and tombs. A second section considers temples (not churches, it is amusing to note), palaces, treasuries, law courts, town halls, colleges, libraries, museums, observatories, lighthouses, markets, exchanges, custom houses, exhibition buildings, theatres, baths, hospitals, prisons, and barracks. Here were all the individual structures of the model Napoleonic city, of which Napoleon had time to build so few but of which the next decades in France and abroad were to see so many executed by Durand’s pupils and other emulators of his ideals.

For less representational edifices, from town halls and markets to prisons and barracks, Durand’s utilitarianism led him to substitute for colonnades and domes plain walls broken by ranges of arcuated openings, sometimes of quattrocento or Roman-aqueduct character but as often of vaguely medieval inspiration. For nearly a half century such paradigms were very frequently followed, not only in France but even more in other countries, as Classicism continued to grow more Romantic.

Nor were the designs for houses that Durand provided in the final section of his book entirely uninfluential.41 However, there were fewer of these, and the inspiration of far more executed work of the next forty or fifty years can be traced to his paradigms for public monuments than to his prescriptions for private dwellings. Indeed, Romantic Classicism is a predominantly public style, and its utilitarianism is of the State rather than of the private individual. However, the opposing current of the Picturesque, reflected in Durand’s book only in his concern for the ‘employment of the objects of nature in the composition of edifices’ (by which he meant hardly more than Italianate fountains and even more Italianate vine-hung loggias), provided amply for the individual (see Chapter 6).

It might seem natural to continue from this discussion of Durand’s treatise with some account of the executed architecture of France during the final years of the Empire after 1810, under the last Bourbons, and under Louis Philippe. Actually, however, the most concrete examples of Durand’s influence, and certainly the finest Durandesque monuments, are to be found not in France but in Germany and Denmark.

By the time of Napoleon, French influence on German architecture was a very old story. More and more French architects were employed by German princes as the eighteenth century proceeded, and by 1800 there were few German centres without examples of their work. As we have seen in the previous chapter, moreover, the work of various German architects in the 1790s and the early 1800s, whether or not they had actually studied or even travelled in France, showed their devotion to the early ideals of Romantic Classicism. Such men as K. G. Langhans and David Gilly in Berlin, Fischer in Munich, or Weinbrenner in Karlsruhe had no Napoleon to employ them; but they were happier than his architects in seeing their major works brought to relatively early completion. At Karlsruhe Weinbrenner’s comprehensive projects for the new quarters of the town continued to go forward down to his death in 1826. By that time his City Hall had finally been finished, and street after street of modest houses filled out the pattern of a coherent Romantic Classical city.

The Karlsruhe Marktplatz stands as one of the happiest ensembles of the early nineteenth century, happy not alone because Weinbrenner, who first conceived it, was able to carry it to final completion before architectural fashions had begun to change, but even more because that first conception dated back to the most vigorous period of the architectural revolution in Germany and was not notably diluted by the more pedestrian standards of later days (Plate 10A). In detail, perhaps, the original designs for the individual buildings were bolder; but the ideal of a public square, not walled in in the Baroque way but defined by discrete blocks, balanced but not identical, and focused by the eye-catching diagonals of the central pyramid, a geometric shape as pure as the cube or the sphere yet also an established formal symbol and a subtle memory of the Egyptian past, was fully realized (Figure 1). Outside the Marktplatz, except perhaps in the Rondellplatz with its central obelisk, Weinbrenner’s work is more provincial though in a very distinguished way. Here and there, moreover, a pointed arch or a touch of asymmetry showed his early response to the contemporary currents of the Picturesque.

Weinbrenner’s death in 1826 and the succession as State architect of Baden of his pupil Heinrich Hübsch (1795-1863) provides a natural break in the Romantic Classical story at just that point when the rise of new ideals began to make the more Classical side of Romantic Classicism out of date—in 1828 Hübsch himself published a characteristic essay, In welchem Styl sollen wir bauen?, a question to which the answers were increasingly various, and rarely the Classical style. Elsewhere in Germany, and notably in Bavaria, where the Wittelsbachs, raised to kingship while in alliance with Napoleon, were also the most culturally ambitious rulers of a post-Napoleonic state, there is no such sharp break. Leo von Klenze, born in 1784 in Hildesheim, lived until 1864; his Munich Propylaeon, completed only the year before his death and begun as late as 1846, is by no means the least Grecian of his works. Klenze (he was ennobled by his royal patron) had studied in Paris under the Empire not only under Durand at the École Polytechnique but also with Percier. In 1805 he had visited the other two main sources of up-to-date architectural inspiration, Italy with its Classical ruins and its Renaissance palaces, and England with its own early version of Romantic Classicism and its various illustrations of the Picturesque. In 1808 Napoleon’s brother Jerome, then King of Westphalia, who was already employing A.-H.-V. Grandjean de Montigny (1776-1850), had made the twenty-four-year-old Paris-trained German his court architect; in 1814 Maximilian I called him to Munich.

In 1816 Klenze began his first major construction, the Munich Glyptothek, a characteristic and externally somewhat dull sculpture gallery. This is dominated in the established French way by a tall temple portico in the centre, and the blank walls at either side are relieved, none too happily, by aedicular niches. But if the exterior (which survived the blitz) is conventional enough the interiors, completed in 1830 and originally filled—among other magnificent antiquities—with the sculpture from the temple at Aegina as repaired and installed by Thorwaldsen, made it one of the finest productions of the great early age of museum-building as long as they existed (Plate 9B). The plan, with a range of top-lit galleries around a court, was generically Durandesque in its square modularity; the sections followed almost line for line one of Durand’s paradigms for art galleries (Figure 3). The sumptuous decoration of the vaults and the superb sculpture so handsomely arranged by Thorwaldsen provided a mixture of periods—real fifth-century Greek and Empire—distressing to purists but wonderfully symptomatic of the ideals of the age.

The Glyptothek was the first building erected in the Königsplatz, a very typical Romantic Classical urbanistic entity. Faced by an even more completely columniated picture gallery, built by G. F. Ziebland (1800-73) in 1838-48, with Klenze’s Propylaeon of 1846-63 forming the far side of the square, the Königsplatz has all the coldness and barrenness which Weinbrenner happily avoided in his Marktplatz; by the time of its completion this must have seemed very out of date, not least to Klenze himself. But as the Propylaeon indicates, Klenze never eschewed trabeated Classicism, however much his best later work belongs to—indeed to a considerable extent actually initiates—the Renaissance Revival.

His Walhalla 42 near Regensburg, built in 1831-42 but based on designs prepared a decade or more earlier, is the most grandly sited of all the copies of Greek and Roman temples which succeeded in the first half of the nineteenth century Jefferson’s initial large-scale example at Richmond, Virginia. Like the finest ancient Greek temples, it is raised high on a hill—that is actually what is most truly Classical about it, as it is also, paradoxically, what may today seem most specifically Romantic (Plate 16A). But the tremendous substructure of staircases and terraces, derived from Friedrich Gilly’s project for the monument to Frederick the Great (Plate 9A), could belong to no other period than this.

In the thirties Klenze, who had already visited Greece in 1823-4 before the establishment of a Wittelsbach monarchy gave employment to Bavarian architects there, was called to Petersburg. There, in 1839-49, rose his Hermitage Museum. The elaborate detailing of this, however Grecian it may be in intention, reflects the growing taste for elaboration in the second quarter of the century as his other Classical works do not. Still later, though not as late as the Propylaeon, is the Munich Ruhmeshalle of 1843-53, a U-shaped Doric stoa which provides in the Hellenistic way a setting for a giant statue of Bavaria by Schwanthaler. This is dull, and still in the old-established Grecian mode of the earlier years of the century. More characteristically, however, Klenze left all that behind him even before 1825, when Maximilian I was succeeded by Ludwig I.

Museums are the most typical monuments of Romantic Classicism, as a whole range of them 43 from the Museo Pio-Clementino by Michelangelo Simonetti (1724-81) at the Vatican in Rome of 1769-74 down at least to the Neuere Pinakothek in Munich of 1846-53 by August von Voit (1801-71) sufficiently illustrate. The two most purely Grecian examples, Smirke’s British Museum in London (Plate 33) and Schinkel’s Neues (later Altes) Museum in Berlin (Plate 13), were not yet designed when Klenze first turned his attention in the years 1822-5 to planning a gallery for paintings at Munich. Begun in 1826 and completed in 1833, the Pinakothek (later Ältere Pinakothek) might be considered the earliest monumental example of revived High Renaissance design. Yet there is little about it that cannot be matched in published French Grand Prix projects or in the plates of Durand; Bonnard’s ministry on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, moreover, must have been rather similar. The Pinakothek was largely destroyed in the Second World War, but has now been rebuilt according to Klenze’s original design, except for the ceiling decorations.

Another building by Klenze, the Königsbau section of the Royal palace in Munich, fronting on the Max-Josephplatz at right angles to Fischer’s theatre, is a more attractive early example of the Renaissance Revival. Begun in the same year 1826 as the Ältere Pinakothek, it was completed in 1833. The façade follows closely that of the Pitti Palace as extended in the seventeenth century, but carries the pilasters of Alberti’s Rucellai Palace, and in designing it Klenze must have drawn heavily on the Architecture toscane of Grandjean de Montigny.44 The planning inside is curiously free and asymmetrical considering the total regularity of the fenestration, but then little trace of the original Pitti plan had survived to be followed by an imitator.

In 1836 Klenze completed this square, so characteristic a product of two generations of Romantic Classicism, by facing the eighteenth-century Palais Törring on the other side from the Königsbau with a quattrocento arcade in order to provide a monumental and harmonious Central Post Office. Another earlier square, the Odeonsplatz, with Klenze’s Leuchtenberg Palais of 1819, his matching Odeon completed in 1828, and a range of shops of 1822, also by him, on the other side of the Ludwigstrasse, has almost as much Italian Renaissance feeling but is less derivatively Tuscan. It follows rather the work of his master Percier in Paris under the Empire.

The increasing eclecticism of Romantic Classical architects is well illustrated by the fact that the Court Church 45 attached to the palace at the rear was built by Klenze in the same years as the Königsbau, 1826-37. This is covered by a series of domes on pendentives, derived presumably from the Madeleine in Paris but detailed to suggest, as Vignon’s do not, the ultimately Byzantine origin of the structural form; the immediate prototype, however, was probably one of Schinkel’s projects for the Werder Church in Berlin (see below).

In the creation of the principal street of Ludwigian Munich, the Ludwigstrasse, a rival of Klenze’s, Friedrich von Gärtner (1792-1847), like Klenze ennobled by his sovereign, played a more important role. Born in Coblenz, Gärtner studied first at the Munich Academy, where he was later to be professor of architecture and, from 1841, director. After his studies in Munich, he travelled in France, Italy, Holland, and England, although he had no formal foreign training such as Klenze’s. Gärtner’s first major work, destined by its tall twin towers to dominate the long and rather monotonous perspective of the Ludwigstrasse, was the Ludwigskirche built in 1829-40 (Plate 10B). If Klenze’s Court Church was Byzantinesque, Gärtner’s church was Romanesquoid, though still in a rather Durandesque way. Even more Durandesque, and very much finer, is the long façade of Gärtner’s State Library next door, which was built in 1831-40 (Plate 10B). Here the tawny tones of the brick and terracotta, as much as the slightly medievalizing detail of the arcuated front, give evidence of the Romantic rejection of the monochromy typical of the Greek Revival. But if this façade is warm in colour it could hardly be colder in design, throwing into happy relief the richer ordonnance of Klenze’s nearby War Office of 1824-6 with its rusticated arches and low wings (Figure 4).

Rounding out the Ludwigstrasse are many other consonant structures. By Klenze is the Herzog Max Palais of 1826-30 on the right; by Gärtner the Blindeninstitut of 1834-8, farther down opposite the Ludwigskirche, and the University of 1834-40 together with the Max Joseph Stift that complete the terminal square. There stands also the inharmoniously Roman Siegestor of 1843-50 which is, rather surprisingly, also by Gärtner. Far more appropriate, if equally unoriginal, is his Feldherrenhalle of 1841-4 at the other end of the street above the Odeonsplatz, a close copy of the fourteenth-century Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. The whole area constitutes what is perhaps the finest, or at least the most coherent, range of streets and squares of the later and more eclectic phase of Romantic Classicism. This exceeds in extent, though not in quality, Weinbrenner’s Marktplatz in Karlsruhe of the preceding quarter century. This brilliant Munich period came to an end on Ludwig I’s abdication in 1848; his successor Maximilian II’s attempt to find a ‘new style’ for his Maximilianstrasse in the next decade was a dismal fiasco, for this ‘new style’ as applied by Friedrich Bürklein (1813-73), a pupil of Gärtner, in building up the new street in 1852-9 proved to be merely a fussy and muddled approach to the English Perpendicular, already employed with more success by Bürklein’s master.

Before his death, the year before Maximilian II’s accession, Gärtner had all but completed the Wittelsbach Palace. This he had begun in 1843 using a very Durandesque version of English Tudor executed in red brick. Red brick also characterizes another example of contemporary eclecticism, the Bonifazius Basilika of 1835-40 by Ziebland. This was designed, as its name implies, in a Romantic Classical version of the Early Christian; but it is much less Roman in detail than the great French and Italian churches of the period of this generic basilican order (see Chapter 3).

Most of these variant aspects of later Romantic Classicism in Munich, whether Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Italian Gothic, or quattrocento in inspiration, are also examples of what was called at this time in Germany the Rundbogenstil.46 A large and prominent example in Munich, late enough to illustrate how this special mode of Romantic Classicism deteriorated after the mid century, was Bürklein’s railway station built in 1857-60. The whole station has now been largely but not entirely destroyed by bombing; originally it had a handsome shed with very heavy arched principals of timber.

Although the mode may be readily paralleled in other North European countries, the Rundbogenstil is peculiarly German. It was, indeed, the favourite mode of the thirties and forties in most German states; certainly it is comparable in local importance to the mature Gothic Revival of these decades in England as the German Neo-Gothic is not (see Chapter 6). Deriving from the more utilitarian arcuated models provided by Durand (and ultimately from the projects of his master Boullée and other French architects of the 1780s), the Rundbogenstil is still a phase of Romantic Classicism even if in it the Romantic element has risen close to dominance. But in its rigidity of composition, repetition of identical elements, and emphasis on direct structural expression it is wholly in the line of the earlier and more Classical rationalism.

The changing taste of these decades usually demanded ever more and busier detail. Rivalry with the archaeological pretensions of the Greek Revival, moreover, called for a certain parade of stylistic erudition. But the archaeological sources drawn upon were very various and to varying degrees effectively documented. From the Early Christian to the quattrocento, most of them were more or less Italianate. However, there were some architects who succeeded—like Gärtner at the Wittelsbach Palace—in using pointed-arched precedent in a characteristically Rundbogenstil way; others elaborated their detail with real originality rather than adhering closely to any past precedent at all.

On its quattrocento side the Rundbogenstil was perhaps most notably represented in Germany by the Johanneum in Hamburg of 1836-9 (completely destroyed in the Second World War), a large building surrounding three sides of a court and incorporating two schools and a library (Plate 11B). This was by C. L. Wimmel (1786-1845), like Hübsch a pupil of Weinbrenner, and F. G. J. Forsmann (1795-1878). This particular Rundbogenstil work can also be classified as belonging, like Klenze’s Königsbau, to the international Renaissance Revival of which Hamburg was rather a centre. For example, the extant Exchange there of 1836-41 by these same architects is of richer and more High Renaissance character and not at all Rundbogenstil.

Many houses in Hamburg built by Gottfried Semper (1803-79), Alexis de Chateauneuf (1799-1853), who had studied in Paris, and others in the forties were of elegant Early Renaissance design—one by the former even having sgraffiti on the walls—more like Klenze’s row of shops in the Odeonsplatz. The Rücker-Jenisch house of 1845 by the Swiss-born Auguste de Meuron (1813-98), a pupil of the same French architect, A.-F.-R. Leclerc, as de Chateauneuf, was certainly not Rundbogenstil but rather a version of the Travellers’ Club in London. Thus it followed, in this anglicizing city, an epoch-making model by Charles Barry that dates from fifteen years earlier (see Chapter 4). However, de Chateauneuf’s Alster Arcade beside the waters of the Kleine Alster and his red brick Alte Post (now the Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv) of 1845-7 in the Poststrasse are both prominent and excellent examples of the Rundbogenstil of this period in Hamburg, the latter being slightly Gothic in its detailing.

The work of Hübsch, Weinbrenner’s successor as State architect in Baden, despite his very serious archaeological study of Early Christian and Romanesque architecture,47 falls somewhere between Gärtner’s Ludwigskirche and Ziebland’s Bonifazius Basilika without achieving either the crisply Durandesque quality of the one or the relative archaeological plausibility of the other. In his civil buildings, such as the very simple Ministry of Finance designed in 1827 and built in 1829-33, the more ornate Technische Hochschule of 1832-6, the Art Gallery of 1840-9, and the Theatre of 1851-3, all in Karlsruhe, very considerable originality of composition was more and more confused as he grew older by the fussy elaboration of the terracotta ornamentation.

In his later work Hübsch frequently used not the round but the segmental arch—a highly rational form with brick masonry—and was usually somewhat happier than the Bavarians in handling the tawny tonalities of brick and terracotta which so generally replaced the pale monochromy of the Greek Revival in the thirties and forties. A minor but especially fine example of his most personal manner is the Trinkhalle of 1840 at Baden-Baden (Plate 11A), rather better suited in its festive spirit to a watering-place than the Classical severity of Weinbrenner’s Kurhaus there of 1821-3. Hübsch’s churches are naturally more archaeological in character and definitely more Romanesquoid than Rundbogenstil. Those at Freiburg (1829-38), Bulach (1834-7), and Rottenburg (1834) are typical. The Rundbogenstil railway stations of another Baden architect, Friedrich Eisenlohr (1804-55), at Karlsruhe (1842) and Freiburg precede Bürklein’s in Munich in date and are rather superior to it.

The Rundbogenstil was particularly dominant in the southern German states, overflowing also into Switzerland, where the Federal Palace in Berne, built in 1851-7 by Friedrich Studer (1817-70), is a particularly extensive and nobly sited example. It was, however, in Prussia in the north of Germany that the greatest architect who worked in this mode was active, and he owes his reputation largely to his Grecian work.

Karl Friedrich von Schinkel, the only architect of the first half of the nineteenth century who can be compared in stature with the English Soane, was the great international master of two successive phases of Romantic Classicism, first of the programmatic Greek Revival, with which the post-Napoleonic period began almost everywhere in the second decade of the century, and then of the more eclectic phase that followed. Born in 1781, a generation later than Soane, Schinkel’s serious architectural production began only in 1816. His relatively early death in 1841 truncated his career; but his pupils and his spirit dominated Prussian, and indeed most of German, architecture for another score of years and more.

Somewhat as the long-lived Titian stood to the short-lived Giorgione stood Schinkel in relation to his near-contemporary and associate Friedrich Gilly, whose projects have already been mentioned (Plate 9A). Indeed, Schinkel showed almost as great a capacity to absorb and continue the revolutionary architectural ideals of the 1780s in France as Gilly—more, certainly, than most of the foreigners who visited Paris during the unproductive years following the Revolution, or even those who stayed on to study there.

Schinkel, however, soon to be one of the most architectonic of architects, made his earliest mark not with architectural projects but, like Inigo Jones in England before him, as a designer of theatre sets. Down to 1815 he executed no buildings of any consequence; but in his paintings of these years, even more perhaps than in his stage sets, he established himself as a High Romantic artist of real distinction. At their best these follow in quality very closely after the master works of German Romantic landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. Characteristically, buildings play an important part in Schinkel’s pictures, and vast Gothic constructions in the ‘Sublime’ spirit of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey are actually more frequent than Grecian or Italianate fabricks.

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.

It is characteristic of the purism of Schinkel’s approach, a purism not archaeological but visual, that this attic masks externally a Durandesque central domed space (Figure 6). Such circular central spaces, so recurrent in Romantic Classical planning, had been a favourite setting for classical sculpture, the principal treasure of most art collections of this period, ever since the Museo Pio-Clementino was built at the Vatican. None is finer than this in the proportional relationship of interior colonnade, plain wall above, and coffered dome with oculus. Most, indeed, are but feeble copies of the Roman Pantheon; this exceeds in distinction, if not in scale, its ancient original.

But the Museum, unlike the Munich Glyptothek, had to have picture galleries as well as sculpture halls; and Schinkel’s organization of these, so much less palatial than Klenze’s in his Pinakothek, is a technical triumph of the rationalistic side of Romantic Classicism. Screens at right angles to the windows, and thus free from glare, provided the greater part of the hanging space, a premonition almost of the movable screens of mid-twentieth-century art galleries (Figure 6).

The external treatment of the rear walls of the Museum, moreover, achieved a clarity of mathematical organization and a subtlety of structural expression in the detailing which was also hardly equalled before the mid twentieth century. Tall windows in two even ranges express clearly the two storeys of galleries behind; the stuccoed walls between delicately suggest by their flat rustication—so like that Soane used on the Bank of England—the scale of fine ashlar masonry. But the giant order of the front is also clearly echoed in the flat corner antae just short of which the string-course between the storeys and the rustication of the walls are stopped. A prototype of such detailing can be seen in the Athenian Propylaea, no doubt familiar to Schinkel through publications; a derivation—or at least a superb twentieth-century parallel—is the way Mies van der Rohe handles the juxtaposition of steel stanchions and brick infilling in his buildings erected for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in the last fifteen years (see Chapter 20).

The rapid deterioration of rationalist Grecian standards, which followed within a few decades even in the hands of Schinkel’s ablest pupils, is to be noted in the Neues Museum, built in 1843-55 by F. A. Stüler (1800-65) behind the Altes Museum. It is even more evident in the contiguous Nationalgalerie, also by Stüler but based on a sketch by Frederick William IV. This temple stands on a very high substructure in an awkward perversion of the theme of Gilly’s monument to Frederick the Great and Klenze’s Walhalla. It was finished only in 1876 by which time, even in Germany, Romantic Classicism was completely dead (see Chapter 9).

Behind his museum Schinkel himself had built in 1828-32, along the banks of the Kupfergraben, the Packhofgebäude. This range of utilitarian structures was definitely consonant, towards the Museum, with the Grecian rationalism of its rear façade. But for the warehouses at the remote end of the group Schinkel used a rather direct transcription of Durand’s paradigm for an arcuated market.48 Here, at almost precisely the same time as at Gärtner’s State Library in Munich and Hübsch’s Ministry of Finance in Karlsruhe, the Rundbogenstil makes an early appearance as an alternative to the trabeated Grecian. In comparably utilitarian works of a few years earlier, the Military Prison in Berlin begun in 1825 and the lighthouse at Arkona of the same date, Schinkel had already used dark brickwork unstuccoed, but with square rather than arched openings; while on his long-demolished Hamburg Opera House, begun also in 1825 and completed in 1827, there were arched openings throughout of a somewhat High Renaissance order but far more severely treated than by Klenze on his Munich Pinakothek.

To the year 1825 belongs too the beginning of the Werder Church in Berlin, Gothic in its vaults, as also in its detail, and executed in brick and terracotta. Less just in its scaling than his earlier Gothic monument of cast iron, this church as executed makes one regret that Schinkel’s domed project of 1822, derived either from Vignon’s interior of the Madeleine in Paris or from one of Durand’s paradigms, was not executed.

In 1826 began Schinkel’s extensive and varied work for the Royal family at Potsdam,49 the town destined to be the richest centre of later Prussian Romantic Classicism. Here he worked in close association with the heir to the throne who was later, after 1840, king as Frederick William IV. This romantic and talented prince—who actually wished he were an architect rather than a ruler—frequently provided Schinkel and, after his death, Schinkel’s pupils with sketches from which as we have seen in the case of the Nationalgalerie) various executed buildings were elaborated with more or less success. One of the great amateurs, his was a very late example of direct Royal intervention in architecture. Some of the modulation of Schinkel’s style towards the Picturesque—still more evident in the work at Potsdam of his ablest pupil Ludwig Persius (1803-45)—may be credited to this princely patron.

In Berlin, in the later twenties, Schinkel was also remodelling and redecorating palaces for Frederick William’s brothers, major works in scale but rather limited in architectural interest.50 More characteristic of Schinkel’s best Grecian manner is the somewhat later palace for Prince William built in 1834-5 by the younger Langhans (K. F., 1781-1869). This architect’s still later theatre at Breslau, begun in 1843, is worth mention at this point and also the old Russian Embassy of 1840-1 in Berlin by Eduard Knoblauch (1801-65), but Schinkel’s comparable work is fifteen years earlier.

At Potsdam, even though much of what he did there also consisted of enlarging earlier buildings, Schinkel was freer than in Berlin. Collaboration with the gardener P. J. Lenné (1789-1866), who provided superb naturalistic settings in the tradition of the English garden, may have encouraged a looser and less Classical sort of composition. In many views, Charlottenhof with its dominating Greek Doric portico, remodelled from 1826 on as the residence of the Crown Prince, may appear a sufficiently conventional Greek Revival country house. But if one considers the planning of the house and its close relation to the raised terrace, and also the relation to the solid block of the open pergola—’an object of nature’ in Durand’s special sense—one sees that here, as earlier at the Zivilcasino, but from no necessity enforced by the site, Schinkel sought to apply the most stringent sort of geometrical order to an asymmetrical composition. For this, of course, the Erechtheum and to some extent the Propylaea on the Akropolis, those two fifth-century Greek examples of Romantic Classicism, provided precedents. At Schloss Glienecke near by, also begun in 1826 for another Prussian prince, Karl, whose palace in Berlin he was remodelling too, the Athenian derivation is very patent in the later belvedere of 1837 based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. But it is the asymmetrical massing of carefully organized elements here that reveals the extent to which Schinkel was able to absorb and actually to synthesize with the discipline of Romantic Classicism one of the major formal innovations of the Picturesque. The bold off-centre location of the tower actually makes of this a sort of Italian Villa in the Cronkhill sense.

In the enlargement of the medieval Kolberg Town Hall in Pomerania, begun in 1829, Schinkel employed secular Late Gothic in a version as stiff and mechanical as that of Gärtner’s Wittelsbach Palace a decade later. A remarkable centrally-planned Hunting Lodge, built for Prince Radziwill at Ostrowo in 1827, on the other hand, illustrated a bold attempt to apply the principles of Durandesque structural rationalism to building in timber; the result is very different indeed from the contemporary American, Russian, and Swedish houses of wood that were designed as copies of marble temples.

In 1828 a series of designs for churches in the new suburbs of Berlin, several of them executed in reduced form in the early thirties, showed a drastic shift away from Classical models—still sometimes offered as alternatives and actually executed in two cases—towards the creation of a very personal sort of Rundbogenstil. All intended to be of brick with terracotta trim, these were less successful than the house he built of the same materials for the brick and terracotta manufacturer Feilner in Berlin in 1829. In its perfect regularity and rigid trabeation this recalled the rear of the Museum (Figure 7). But the employment of delicate arabesque reliefs in the jambs of the openings, quite in the quattrocento way, illustrated rather more agreeably than the church projects the characteristic modulation in these years away from Grecian and towards Italianate models.

The happiest and most informal example of this modulation is to be seen in the Court Gardener’s House on the Charlottenhof estate of 1829-31 (Plate 14A). The closely associated Tea House and Roman Bath of 1833-4 loosely enclose the square rear garden at the junction of two canals. As the plan of the house itself clearly reveals, this was not a new construction but a remodelling, or encasing, of an earlier gardener’s house; but more important to the total effect than the original solid block is the skilful disposition of the clearly defined voids in the three-dimensional composition, voids which include pergolas of varying height, loggias, and even an open attic below the main roof.

On the one hand, the inspiration for this must have come from Durand’s illustrations of the ‘employment of the objects of nature’ or perhaps from other French works 51 more specifically dealing with Italian buildings in the countryside. On the other hand, rather more than most English Italian Villas in the line of Nash’s Cronkhill, this seems to be based on some real knowledge of Italian rural, not to say rustic, building. But visually, as at Cronkhill and at Glienecke, the pivot of the whole composition is the tower around which the various elements, solid and hollow, are as carefully organized as in a piece of twentieth-century Neoplasticist sculpture. This Gardener’s House is as much the international masterwork of the asymmetrically-towered Italian Villa mode, one of the more modest yet extremely significant innovations of the first half of the nineteenth century, as is the Altes Museum of formal Grecian Classicism.

At Potsdam and near by Schinkel’s pupil Persius, before his untimely death only four years after Schinkel’s, produced many other compositions of this order, often by remodelling eighteenth-century buildings.52 Two of the finest are the Pheasantry, which is specifically a towered Italian Villa, and the group that includes the Friedenskirche, carried out by others from Persius’s designs in 1845-8 (Plate 15). In this latter group the principal feature is a close copy of an Early Christian basilica, even to the inclusion of a real medieval apse mosaic brought from Murano; yet compositionally the group is a masterpiece of the classically ordered Picturesque, rivalling Schinkel’s Gardener’s House in subtlety and elegance. Even more personal to Persius is the delicacy of detailing and the unusual external arcade of his earlier Heilandskirche of 1841-3, with its graceful detached campanile, by the lakeside at nearby Sakrow.

Also notable are his steam-engine houses, particularly that for Schloss Babelsberg. The inclusion of medieval and even Islamic detail indicates the increasing eclecticism of taste around 1840; yet the disparate elements are so scaled and ordered as to compose into an asymmetrical pattern of Italian Villa character in which the minaret-like chimney provides the dominant vertical accent. Less Picturesque is the Orangerieschloss, based on a sketch by Frederick William IV and executed after Persius’s death by A. Hesse.

Schinkel’s big Potsdam church, the Nikolaikirche, designed in 1829 and built up to the base of the dome in the years 1830-7, stood right in the town, not in the park like his work for the princes, and is a wholly formal monument. It was planned as a hemisphere above a cube in the most geometrical mode of Romantic Classicism. As in the case of Soufflot’s dome of the Panthéon, this was undoubtedly influenced by Wren’s St Paul’s in London which Schinkel had seen on an English voyage in 1826. Unfortunately Persius had later to add corner towers, almost like the minaret chimney of his Babelsberg engine house, in order to load the pendentives when he completed the church in 1842-50. These irrelevant features quite denature Schinkel’s formal intention. The interior, however, is superior to those in most of the centrally planned churches of this period in various countries that were based on the Roman Pantheon.

Schinkel did not have such opportunities of building whole squares and streets as did his Baden and his Bavarian contemporaries. For all his efforts, the Berlin Lustgarten was probably never very satisfactory urbanistically because of the inadequate focus that was provided by his modest cathedral beside the massive Baroque Schloss and the awkward shift in the axis where the Schlossbrücke enters from Unter den Linden. At the other end of Unter den Linden the Pariser Platz inside K. G. Langhans’s Brandenburg Gate shows little evidence of Schinkel’s intended regularization of the surrounding buildings. All that he was actually able to carry out there was the Palais Redern of 1832-3 (in fact a remodelling), and this was demolished in 1906 to make way for the Adlon Hotel.

The façades of the Palais Redern gave a quattrocento Florentine impression because of their relatively bold over-all rustication; only the large openings were arcuated, however, the ordinary windows being lintel-topped. Significant of Schinkel’s new interest in asymmetrical order was the disposition of the four arched openings; these were balanced in relation to the corner of Unter den Linden but unbalanced in relation to either façade alone; the other windows were quite regularly spaced.

If Schinkel seems to have adopted here a version of the Renaissance Revival—as, for that matter, he had already done much earlier in his somewhat similar remodelling of the Berlin City Hall in 1817—at the Neue Tor, also of 1832, he provided two gatehouses which were in a sort of Rundbogenstil Tudor comparable to Gärtner’s Wittelsbach Palace of fifteen years later. His trip to England 53 had fascinated him with English architecture, old and new; there he had noted everything with intelligent interest—from medieval castles to the towering new cotton mills near Manchester with their internal skeletons of iron. He had no occasion, however, to make large-scale use of iron construction, though there is little doubt that had he lived on through the forties he would have done so with both technical and aesthetic mastery.

At Schloss Babelsberg,54 built for the rather tasteless brother of his own particular patron, later the Emperor William I, he essayed an English sort of castle, admittedly more in the contemporary Picturesque mode of the new Castellated Mansions of Nash and Wyatt than like any real medieval one. This was designed in 1834 and begun in 1835. Persius took it over on Schinkel’s death, redesigning one of the principal towers, and it was finally finished after Persius’s death by Heinrich Strack (1805-80) in 1849. Though certainly not inferior to Smirke’s Eastnor or Cundy’s Hawarden, if without the lovely site and the richly organic composition of Busby’s Gwrych, Babelsberg is better appreciated in Schinkel’s or Persius’s drawings than in actuality. Schloss Kamenz, a rather Tudoresque remodelling of an earlier structure which Schinkel undertook in 1838, is more typical but no more successful.

Although playing but a very minor part in Schinkel’s own production, his exercises in the Chalet mode should at least be mentioned. Not only do these illustrate the very wide range of his own eclectic inspiration, considerably wider than that of Durand and the French of the previous generation, they also represent one of the peripheral aspects of his achievement which his pupils, and German architects of the mid century generally, delighted to exploit. The happiest work of his followers, however, continued rather the Italian Villa line of Glienecke and the Court Gardener’s House, a line in which Persius at least all but equalled his master.

The Grecian work of Schinkel’s imitators and emulators tended to be overdecorated and lacking in geometrical order while their Rundbogenstil is in general awkwardly proportioned and incoherently ornamented (see Chapter 9). Outside Prussia, such Hamburg architects as Wimmel & Forsmann and de Chateauneuf illustrate better than other North Germans the real possibilities of the Rundbogenstil. De Chateauneuf had something of an international reputation, moreover, after winning the second prize in the competition held in 1839-40 for the Royal Exchange in London. His design for that was based on the Loggia dei Lanzi, and may well have provided the suggestion for Gärtner’s Feldherrenhalle in Munich begun the next year.

It is impossible and unnecessary to follow Romantic Classicism to all the other German centres. At Darmstadt the Classical Ludwigskirche of 1822-7 by Georg Moller (1784-1852),55 a pupil of Weinbrenner, is a handsome circular edifice with an internal colonnade below the dome. Thus it is rather like the ‘central space’ in Schinkel’s Museum, but more broadly proportioned. A boldly arched entrance of almost Ledolcian character is set against the external circumference of blank wall rather than the more usual temple portico. The Artillery Barracks at Darmstadt of 1825-7 by Moller’s pupil Franz Heger (1792-1836) provided a notably early example of the Rundbogenstil. Comparable was August Busse’s Castellated Zellengefängnis in Berlin of 1842-9, the first German example of a penitentiary radially planned and with individual cells (see Chapter 5). Stüler’s destroyed Trinitatiskirche in Cologne, a Persius-like Early Christian basilica completed in 1860, was much finer than his Berlin churches (see Chapter 9).

Also Rundbogenstil, but of a more medievalizing order, was Semper’s Synagogue of 1838-41 in Dresden. Its centralized massing is uncharacteristically plastic. His Palais Oppenheim there of 1845-8 at 9-11 An der Bürgerwiese, based on Raphael’s Pandolfini Palace, was a handsome and very ‘correct’ example of the international Renaissance Revival to be compared, like de Meuron’s house in Hamburg, with Barry’s London clubhouses. The Cholera Fountain of 1843 in Dresden was Gothic, however, providing further evidence of Semper’s rather directionless eclecticism at this time.

His principal works of this period were the first Opera House 56 in Dresden of 1837-41, where Wagner’s early triumphs took place, burnt and rebuilt by Semper later, and the nearby Art Gallery of 1847-54 which completed so unhappily the circuit of the marvellous Rococo Zwinger by Daniel Pöppelmann. The one was a rather festive, the other a rather solemn example of the Renaissance Revival; both are more notable for their planning and their general organization than for any visual distinction (Figure 8). The Opera House in Hanover, built by G. L. F. Laves (1789-1864) in 1845-52, is less original in plan but more sober, even a bit Schinkelesque, in design (Plate 14B). Its interior has been completely done over since it was bombed in the Second World War.

The historian tends always to press forward, forcing rather than retarding the pace of development in his written account. Klenze’s Propylaeon, however, has already provided evidence of the late continuance of Grecian ideals in the German States; in Stuttgart the Königsbau of 1857-60 by C. F. Leins (1814-92), a pupil in Paris of Henri Labrouste, provides a worthier example, although this was actually begun twenty years earlier by J. M. Knapp (1793-1861). In Vienna, as late as 1873, the Parliament House of Theophil von Hansen (1813-91) provides a gargantuan example of what the French had first aspired to build almost a century earlier. Ambiguous in its massing, if still very elegant in its Grecian detail, this contrasts markedly with Hansen’s other Viennese work of the third quarter of the century which is generally of High Renaissance design (see Chapter 8).

This Copenhagen-born and trained architect knew Greece at first hand, for he and his brother H. C. Hansen (1803-83) worked in Athens for some years for the Wittelsbachs and the Danish dynasty that succeeded them. Along University Street in Athens a conspicuous range of porticoed structures is theirs. The University, built in 1837-42, is by the elder brother; the Academy, built in 1859-87, was designed by Theophil and executed by his pupil Ernst Ziller; the National Library was also designed by Theophil in 1860 and completed in 1892. Conventional essays in the international Greek Revival mode, here made somewhat ironical by their proximity to the great fifth-century ruins, these lack the elegance and refinement of Theophil’s Palais Dimitriou of 1842-3 (lately destroyed by the enlargement of the Grande Bretagne Hotel towards Syndagma Square) as also the more than Schinkelesque restraint of the earliest Romantic Classical building in Greece. This is Gärtner’s gaunt but distinguished Old Palace,57 designed in 1835-6 for Otho of Wittelsbach immediately after his assumption of the Greek throne and built in 1837-41 (Plate 17A).

The Old Palace and its neighbour the Grande Bretagne still dominate the centre of modern Athens. The palace, in its regularity, its austerity, and its geometrical clarity of design, is a finer archetype of the most rigid Romantic Classical ideals than anything Gärtner built in Munich; indeed, perhaps those ideals were nowhere else ever followed so drastically at monumental scale except in Denmark. One may even wonder irreverently if the fifth century had many civil buildings that were so pure and so calm!

Gärtner and the Hansens set the pace for a local Greek Revival vernacular of a rather North European order. In its detail this vernacular sometimes exceeds in delicacy that of the later centuries of antiquity, as illustrated here in the Stoa of Attalos in the Agora—at least as that has lately been reconstructed—or the Arch of Hadrian. Not all of the new construction was Grecian, however: Klenze’s Roman Catholic Cathedral (Aghios Dionysios) in University Street is a basilica with Renaissance detail, built in 1854-63; the modest English Church of 1840-3 is rather feebly Gothic and reputedly based on a design provided by C. R. Cockerell that was much modified in execution.

Of the leading Greek architects of the period, Lyssander Kaftanzoglou (1812-85), Stamathios Kleanthis (1802-62), and Panajiotis Kalkos (1800?-1870?), only Kleanthis was German-trained. This talented pupil of Schinkel followed his master’s Italianate rather than his Grecian line, and the house he built in 1840 for the Duchesse de Plaisance on Kiffisia Avenue (now the Byzantine Museum) is a distinguished example of a Durandesque Italian villa, with simple arcading front and rear and low corner towers. Kaftanzoglou, trained at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris and in Milan, was somewhat less able; but the large quadrangular Grecian structure that he designed in the fifties and built in 1862-80 to house the Polytechneion in Patissia Street more than rivals the academic buildings by the Hansens in University Street in the careful ordering of its parts and the correct elegance of its details. Of Kalkos’s work little remains in good condition today.

The new capital of remote Greece possesses more, and on the whole more impressive, Romantic Classical buildings than do Vienna and Budapest, capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In them ambitious urbanistic projects were initiated only later after the accession of Francis Joseph in 1848. The Theseus Temple in the Volksgarten in Vienna of 1821-3 by Peter von Nobile (1774-1854),58 a Swiss who had made his reputation in Trieste, is hardly more than a large Grecian garden ornament conscientiously copying the fifth-century Hephaisteion in Athens line for line. His nearby Burgtor, begun the following year, is much worthier in its heavy, almost Sanmichelian, way. More characteristic, however, is the work of Joseph Kornhäusel (1782-1860) and of Paul Sprenger (1798-1854).

Kornhäusel’s Schottenhof, opening off the Schottengasse, is a housing development built in 1826-32 in collaboration with Joseph Adelpodinger (1778-1849). This is of extraordinary extent and arranged very regularly around several large internal courts. The smooth stucco walls, restricted ornamentation, and regular fenestration, brought out to the wall surface by double windows, can be matched in many streets of the city that were built up in these decades. Behind such a façade in the Seitenstettengasse lies Kornhäusel’s elegant but rather modest Synagogue of 1825-6. This has an elliptical dome and an internal colonnade that carries a narrow gallery. Much richer is his rectangular main hall of 1823-4 in the Albertina; as has been noted, this palace had already been enlarged in 1801-4 in Romantic Classical style by Montoyer. Kornhäusel’s hall is finished in mirror and in pale yellow and pale mauve scagliola with chalk-white Grecian details and sandstone statues of the Muses by J. Klieber.

With Kornhäusel all is classical; Sprenger, on the other hand, employed a rather tight version of the Rundbogenstil, more Renaissance than medievalizing, for his considerably later Mint of 1835-7 in the Heumarkt in Vienna. More original, and with charming arched window-frames of terracotta in delicate floral bands, is his Landeshauptmannschaft of 1846-8 at 11 Herrengasse. This contrasts happily with the Diet of Lower Austria, projected in 1832-3 and built in 1837-44 by Luigi Pichl (1782-1856), next door at No. 13, a rather heavy and conventional example of Romantic Classicism; so also does No. 17, a very simple block originally built by Moreau for the Austro-Hungarian Bank in 1821-3. The later bank building across the Herrengasse at No. 14, built by Heinrich von Ferstel (1828-83) in 1856-60, well illustrates the modulation of the Rundbogenstil here, as in Germany, towards richer and more Gothicizing forms after the mid century. The glass-roofed passage extending through this to the Freyung is still very attractive, despite its shabby condition, and worthy of comparison with other extant examples of passages elsewhere in the Old and New Worlds (see Chapters 3, 5, and 8).

The great nineteenth-century Viennese building campaign of Francis Joseph began in 1849 with the initiation of the Arsenal. There the outer ranges (now mostly destroyed by bombing) were completed in 1855 from designs by Edward Van der Nüll (1812-65), a pupil of Nobile and Sprenger, and his partner August Siccard von Siccardsburg (1813-68). The Army Museum of 1850-6 is by Ludwig Foerster (1797-1863) and Theophil von Hansen (who had married Forster’s daughter after moving from Athens to Vienna), and the chapel of 1853-5 is by Karl Rosner (1804-59). These are all in slightly varying Rundbogenstil modes, and they show, like Ferstel’s bank, the changed taste of the mid century, most notably in their rather violent brick polychromy (see Chapter 8).

In Budapest the National Museum of 1837-44 by Michael Pollák (1773-1855) is a vast rectangle fronted in the conventional way by an octostyle Corinthian portico and with a somewhat Schinkel-like severity of treatment on the side wings. This is another major example of the museums which were such characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism everywhere. Among many other large and typical public monuments designed by Pollák, the Kommitat Building may be mentioned as of comparable size and dignity to his museum.

If first Greece and then Austria employed Danish Hansens in the forties and fifties, the earlier Romantic Classical tradition of C. F. Hansen, who in any case lived on until 1845, was still better maintained at home by his pupil M. G. B. Bindesbøll (1800-56). Where C. F. Hansen’s inspiration was Roman and Parisian, Bindesbøll’s seems rather to have been German, as was common in his generation. Certainly his masterpiece, again a museum and indeed a museum of sculpture, out-Schinkels Schinkel. The Thorvaldsens Museum 59 in Copenhagen was built in 1839-48 to house the sculpture and the collections of the thoroughly Romanized Bertil Thorwaldsen, which he had determined in 1837 to present to his native country. The mode, of course, is Greek but completely astylar like the rear of Schinkel’s Berlin Museum; the general impression, particularly of the court with Thorvaldsen’s tomb in its centre, is surprisingly Egyptian (Plate 16B). The mathematical severity of the architectural design is warmed by the murals on the walls, once largely washed away but now all renewed; they romanticize thoroughly its rigid geometrical forms. Even the purely architectural elements, moreover, were once polychromed, if the present restoration of the colour is correct.

The murals on the exterior of the museum were designed in 1847-8 and executed in 1850 by Jørgen Sonne in a sort of coloured plaster intarsia with heavy black outlines. Developing a happy idea of Bindesbøll’s, these tell rather realistically the story of the transport of the sculpture from Rome to Copenhagen. The foliate work on the court walls was carried out by H. C. From in 1844—laurel-trees, oaks, and palms. In the interiors, where Thorwaldsen disposed his own sculptures somewhat less formally than he had the Aegina sculptures in the Munich Glyptothek, the intricate and brightly coloured decoration of the barrel vaults is in that Pompeian mode which had been a part of the Romantic Classical tradition ever since the time of Clérisseau and Adam. This provides a happy contrast to so much Neo-Classic white marble statuary set against plain walls painted in strong flat colours. The finest of these ceilings have no modern rivals, even in Adam’s eighteenth-century work, for the precise geometrical organization of the panels and the delicate refinement of the very low plaster reliefs. Bolder and wholly abstract are the floors of tile mosaic arranged in a bewildering variety of patterns, some imitated from Roman models but more of them so original in design that they suggest ‘hardedge’ paintings of the 1960s.

In his few other executed works and projects Bindesbøll showed himself considerably less Classical and Schinkelesque than in this museum; perhaps the museum reflects Thorvaldsen’s taste as much or more than his own. Tending, like other Danes of his generation, towards the Rundbogenstil in his urban buildings, for his country houses he arrived at a very direct and logical rural mode in which rustic materials and asymmetrical compositions were controlled by a Romantic Classical sense of order and decorum. If, on the one hand, his interest in bold structural polychromy in the fifties parallels that of the English Butterfield, his domestic mode forecasts that of the English Webb (see Chapters 10 and 12). Bindesbøll’s production was small indeed, but at least the very simple Rundbogenstil Agricultural School of 1856-8 at 13 Bulowsvej in Copenhagen, executed after his death, deserves specific mention here.

J. D. Herholdt (1818-1902), living almost half a century longer than Bindesbøll, was naturally more productive. He was also a master of the Rundbogenstil hardly rivalled in his generation even by the ablest Germans. Late as is his National Bank at 17 Holmens Kanal in Copenhagen—1866-70—this is one of the finest examples anywhere of the more Tuscan sort of Rundbogenstil. His University Library of 1857-61 in the Frue Plads is less suave in design but much more original in its brick detailing. As late as the eighties he maintained the Romantic Classical discipline in his Italian Gothic Raadhus at Odense of 1880-3 as well as carrying out many tactful restorations of Romanesque churches. Of his fine Copenhagen Station of 1863-4 the wooden shed now serves on another site as a sports hall.

G. F. Hetsch (1830-1903) also continued the Romantic Classical line, most happily perhaps in his Sankt Ansgarskirke of 1841-2, the Roman Catholic church in the Bredgade in Copenhagen. Ferdinand Meldahl (1827-1908), although capable of very disciplined Early Renaissance design in his office building at 23 Havnegade in Copenhagen of 1864, led Danish architecture away from Romantic Classicism and the Rundbogenstil towards a rather Second Empire sort of eclecticism after he became professor at the Copenhagen Academy in 1864 and its director in 1873 (see Chapter 8).

With its great individual monuments by C. F. Hansen and Bindesbøll and its streets of fine houses in the Romantic Classical vernacular, Copenhagen provides today a more attractive picture of the production of this period than almost any other city. Norway, at this time less prosperous than Denmark, has work by Schinkel himself. At least the designs for the buildings of the University at Christiania, erected in 1841-51 by C. H. Grosch (1801-65), a pupil of C. F. Hansen and of Hetsch, were revised by Schinkel just before his death, and the handling of the walls is certainly quite characteristic of his work in the clarity and logic of their articulation.

In Sweden, where the dominant influences in the early nineteenth century were first French and then German as in Denmark, there was no comparably brilliant development of Romantic Classicism. Rosendal, a country house built in 1823-5 by Fredrik Blom (1781-1851), is a pleasant and very discreet edifice that might well be by almost any French architect of Blom’s generation. His Skeppsholm Church in Stockholm of 1824-42, circular within and octagonal without, is a typical but not especially distinguished work of its period. More characteristic are the modest wooden houses with Grecian detail. These are similar to, but in their naive ‘correctness’ less extreme than, the temple houses of Russia and the United States. Their board-and-batten walls might, paradoxically, have inspired one aspect of Downing’s anti-Grecian campaign in America in the forties (see Chapter 15).

In 1850 Stüler was called to Stockholm from Berlin to design the National Museum. Eventually completed in 1865, this is in a richer Venetian Renaissance mode than he usually employed at home. Such more definitely Romantic modes were generally exploited by native architects only much later. For example, the Sodra Theatre of 1858-9 in Stockholm by J. F. Åbom (1817-1900) is still quite a restrained example of the revived High Renaissance; while so excellent a specimen of the more Tuscan sort of Rundbogenstil as the Skandias Building in Stockholm by P. M. R. Isaeus (1841-90) and C. Sundahl dates from 1886-9, but must be compared with German work of at least a generation earlier.

Holland has even less of distinction to offer in this period than Sweden.60 Yet the Lutheran Round Church on the Singel in Amsterdam, as it was rebuilt after a fire in 1826 by Jan de Greef (1784-1834) and T. F. Suys (1783-1861), a pupil of Percier, lends a distinctly Venetian air to the local scene with its great dome, despite the admirably Dutch quality of its fine brickwork. The original church was built in 1668-77 by Adriaen Dortsmann, and doubtless the peculiar plan, with main entrance under the pulpit and double galleries at the rear outside the main rotunda, derives from the older building.

The monumentally Classical Haarlemer Poort of 1840 in Amsterdam by J. D. Zocher (1790-1870) may also be mentioned, as it is nearly unique in Holland. This has the stuccoed walls that, in Holland as elsewhere, generally replaced exposed brickwork under the influence of international Romantic Classicism. The Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, built by Z. Reijers in 1839 and demolished in 1933, dominated by an Ionic portico of stone, might well have risen in any French provincial city of the day. Very similar, except that the portico is Corinthian, is the Palace of Justice in Leeuwarden built in 1846-52 by T. A. Romein (1811-81). Handsome also, but like the Hague Academy less autochthonous in character than the Round Church, is the long stone façade beside the Rokin of the Nederlandsche Bank in the Turfmarkt (1860) by Willem Anthony Froger. On the whole, Holland is the exception that proves the rule. Almost alone in Northern Europe Dutch architects failed, in general, to accept Romantic Classicism as it was adumbrated most notably in the treatise of Durand; while local conditions, in any case, reduced monumental architectural production to a minimum in the decades between Waterloo and the mid century.

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