Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 

Born Mar. 13, 1781, in Neuruppin, Brandenburg; died Oct. 9, 1841, in Berlin. German architect, painter, and graphic artist.

Schinkel studied at the Berlin Academy of Architecture under F. Gilly from 1798 to 1800. He worked mainly in Berlin. He initially concentrated on painting and the graphic arts, producing landscapes, panoramas, works of stage design, drawings, and lithographs in the romantic style.

The most outstanding representative of late classicism in 19th-century German architecture, Schinkel strove for laconically monumental composition. His works include the Neue Wache (now a monument to the victims of fascism and militarism), the Drama Theater, and the Altes Museum, all in Berlin. He also revealed romantic tendencies in his pseudo-Gothic buildings, including a chapel in Petergof (1831–33). In the last years of his life, renouncing the forms of classicism and the Gothic, he anticipated the principles of rationalism, for example, in the Academy of Architecture in Berlin (1831–35). He also was an architectural theorist.

WORKS

Grundlage der praktischen Baukunst, 4th ed., vols. 1–4. Berlin [1850].
Briefe, Tagebücher, Gedanken. Berlin [1922].

REFERENCES

Rave, P. O. Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Berlin [1948].
Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Lebenswerk, vols. 1–7, 9–13. Berlin-Munich, 1939–69. (Publication in progress.)
Pundt, H. G. Schinkel’s Berlin. Cambridge, Mass., 1972.