Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Späte Projekte/Late Projects

Karl Friedrich Schinkel called his designs for a
palace on the Acropolis in Athens and for Orianda
Castle in the Crimea a 'beautiful dream'.
They date from 1834 and 1838 and were Schinkel’s
last major projects, in which he presented
his ideal of architecture in brilliant drawings and
watercolours, as if in a last will and testament.
Both the formal language of neo-Classical architecture
and the quality of presentation are
brought to a level here that can scarcely be surpassed.
It is clear how highly Schinkel himself
esteemed these two unrealized designs from the
fact that he had them printed as coloured lithographs
in his publication Werke der höheren Baukunst
für die Ausführung erfunden (Potsdam 1840
to 1842).
These lithographs are reprinted in a large format,
complemented by the no less spectacular
lithographs of the two Pliny villas, Tusculum, and
Laurentinum. These works, which represent a
highpoint in the long story of the reconstruction
of the two villas that have come down to us only
in literature, also show Schinkel’s impressive
ability to demonstrate and convey his architectural
ideas. He is profoundly concerned, both in the
reconstructions of the Pliny villas and in the designs
for the royal palace on the Acropolis and
Orianda Castle to be archaeologically precise and
to fulfil prescribed building programmes, but also
to plumb the possibilities of architecture beyond
mere utility. For the Acropolis palace project he
had his eye mainly on the way in which the new
building would interact with the surviving remains
of the Propylaea and the Parthenon. In the Orianda
project it is a glazed observation pavilion
in the form of a temple that expresses architecture’s
perception of itself more clearly than perhaps
ever before.
Klaus Jan Philipp studied art history, archaeology,
and history in Marburg and Berlin. He gained
his doctorate with a thesis on medieval architecture
in southwest Germany. From 1988 to 1990
he worked as a free-lance at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum
in Frankfurt am Main, where
he organized the exhibition 'Revolutionsarchitektur.
Ein Aspekt der europäischen Architektur
um 1800'. Philipp is professor of architectural
history at Stuttgart University. He presented his
research on neo-Classical architecture in 1997
in the post-doctoral thesis Um 1800: Architekturtheorie
und Architekturkritik in Deutschland zwischen
1790 und 1810.