Review: Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Geschichte und Poesie

Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Geschichte und Poesie

Review by: Dietrich Neumann
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 73, No. 1 (March 2014), pp. 155-157
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians
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EXHI BI TI ONS 155
would ensure its proper cataloging and
preservation, feats that would be difcult
to achieve in India. A visit to the Chandi-
garh City Museum demonstrates how Le
Corbusiers drawings have been treated
and makes Correas choice under standable.
The exhibition, designed by David
Adjaye and curated by Irena Murray, was
spread over two oors. On the lower level
a series of timber plinths painted in
delightful hues of paprika, turmeric, and
saffron invoked the Jawahar Kala Kendra
project that Correa realized in Jaipur
between 1986 and 1991. Although this
dramatic introduction to the work led
one to expect something really special,
the exhibition failed to do justice to this
enigmatic architect. Exhibitions of archi-
tecture are peculiar affairs, not least
because they usually feature not architec-
ture but the machinery created as a result
of, or to enable the production of, the
artifact in questionwhat Correa himself
calls the trail left by a snail. The gap
between drawing and architecture is
especially apparent in an exhibition of
Correas work. The buildings and spaces
(the empty center, in Correas parlance)
need to be moved through, set against an
open sky, and, as Adjaye suggests in the
catalogue, absorbed through the soles
of the feet. Neither a rendered elevation
nor a static photograph fully captures his
work.
It is possible to gain considerable plea-
sure from studying sketches, which allow
a viewer to glimpse the person behind
the drawings. The architect who made the
pencil lines and drew with colored crayons
is partly discernible in these marks. At this
exhibition, however, viewers did not even
look at the actual drawings. Instead, they
saw scanned reproductions mounted on
board, grossly enlarged in a process that
too often reduced them to visible pixels.
The same drawings look wonderful in the
excellent catalogue. If the original draw-
ings could not be displayed owing to the
high lighting levels in the RIBA gallery, it
might have been better not to show them
at all or simply to reproduce them at the
original scale. The blown-up photographs
were more forgiving, but some of them were
also blurred and thus not really of exhibi-
tion quality.
Despite these distractions, the models
made a strong case for the architects
work and distracted the visitor from the
poor-quality images. The Hindustan Lever
Pavilion model in tropical hardwood is
spectacular, its design still radical long after
the building was erected in Delhi in 1961,
and the model of the Kanchanjunga Apart-
ments (Mumbai, 197083), standing more
than six feet tall, put individual apartments
at eye level and gave glimpses into the inte-
rior spaces. The housing section was the
real strength of the exhibition and arguably
of Correas careerfrom the Tube House
(Ahmedabad, 1962), now destroyed, to the
one-off houses in brick and concrete to
the PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de
Vivienda) experimental houses in Peru of
196973 (a project to which James Stirling
also contributed) and the courtyard houses
in Belapur of 198386, Correa has demon-
strated how to design dwellings for people
of all classes. It is these schemes, along
with his Mumbai analysis and proposals,
that have made him one of Indias greatest
architects. (What will the RIBA call the
exhibition if Doshi follows suit with his
archive? Indias Greatest Architect 2?)
The rest of the exhibitions content was
predictable; I had hoped to see some of the
less well-known designs or more analysis
of the larger projects. For example, because
the confrontational LIC (Life Insurance
Corporation) building in Delhi, completed
in 1986, was missing from the exhibition,
the question of how it ts with Correas
desire to address the specics of site and
context remains unanswered. In many ways
the designer and curator played it safe,
and except for the postmodern British
Council building in Delhi of 1992 and the
outstanding Champalimaud Center for the
Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, completed
in 2010, they excluded from the exhibition
much of the playful later work.
The digital archive interface has been
carefully crafted. It includes the entire col-
lection of drawings and contains photo-
graphs of the models and buildings as well
as scans of magazine articles and books
that discuss the projects in question. The
digital archive should have played a central
role in the exhibition, moving the empha-
sis, at least in part, from the static mode of
exhibiting and the passive mode of viewing
an exhibition. Here was the perfect oppor-
tunity to project all of Correas work in a
small space, to use the displays to examine
it critically, and perhaps to explore more
fully why Correa might just be Indias
greatest architect.
iain jackson
University of Liverpool
Related Publication
Irena Murray, Charles Correa: Indias Great-
est Architect (London: RIBA, 2013), 72 pp.,
40 color and 32 b/w illus. 9.95, ISBN
9781859465172
Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Geschichte
und Poesie
[Karl Friedrich Schinkel: History and
Poetics]
Kulturforum, Berlin
7 September 20126 January 2013
Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung,
Munich
1 February12 May 2013
More than thirty years have passed since the
work of Germanys preeminent nineteenth-
century architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel
(17811841) was presented in a major ret-
rospective in Berlin. In 1981, to mark the
two hundredth anniversary of his birth,
both parts of the divided city held separate
exhibitions. East Berlin made use of the
most obvious choice for such an event,
Schinkels Altes Museum of 1825, and
proudly focused on his buildings in the
center of Berlin and Potsdam (both part of
East Germany at that time), exhibiting a
series of large models and architectural
drawings. West Berlins museums had
inherited Schinkels paintings, as well as
some drawings, furniture, and furnishings,
andnolens volensfocused on those,
downplaying his architecture and empha-
sizing the work of his pupils and followers.
The site of the exhibition was the Martin-
Gropius-Bau of 1881, designed by one of
Schinkels students.
The recent exhibition, conceived by an
institution located in the western part of
Berlin, at rst sight seemed to have fol-
lowed in the footsteps of its predecessor
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156 JSAH / 73: 1, MARCH 2014
before the fall of the Wall. It too, down-
played Schinkels architecture, and instead
emphasized his paintings, drawings, and
sketches and his designs for furniture
and furnishings. The reasons, however,
were not Cold War constraints but a sub-
stantial research grant from the German
Ministry of Education and Research to
Berlins Kupferstichkabinett (the draw-
ing and print collection of Berlins State
Museums, housed at the former West
Berlin Kulturforum near Potsdamer Platz),
charging it to catalog, critically examine,
and make accessible all of Schinkels
approximately fty-ve hundred sketches,
drawings, and paintings in its holdings.
The multiyear research project was led by
the director of the Kupferstichkabinett,
Hein-Theodor Schulze Altcappenberg,
an expert on the drawings of Botticelli and
Tiepolo, with conservator Irene Brckle
and curator Rolf H. Johannssen, supported
by a team of art and architectural historians,
among them Werner Oechslin and Kurt
W. Forster. The results were a two-day
conference in 2011, two small studio shows,
two substantial publications, a website
documenting Schinkels entire graphic and
painterly oeuvre, and this major exhibition,
which served as the capstone of this ambi-
tious project.
The exhibition catalogue follows the
shows arrangement closely and displays
all its objects in excellent color reproduc-
tions. A second publication contains the
talks presented at the 2011 conference and
a few additional essays. Here, too, Schinkels
graphic output stands at the center. Essays
probe, for example, the relationship between
his architecture and scenographic designs,
the ideas behind his perspectival renderings,
his travel sketches from England, France,
and Italy, his allegorical paintings, and his
furniture drawings.
The website (www.smb.museum
schinkel), perhaps the most ambitious
undertaking of this project, brings together
all of Schinkels sketches and drawings,
many prints, and a large amount of com-
parative material (6,893 items in all). It is
fully searchable and offers information
about provenance and pertinent literature,
as well as occasional scholarly commen-
tary. Its importance for researchers can
hardly be overestimated. One of the great
advantages of an online database is that it
can be improved, updated, and expanded
over time as more research is conducted.
Much remains to be done in this case to
designate the authorship of individual
drawings, to determine the roles of differ-
ent individuals in the design process, and
to identify collaborative works. Commen-
taries on a particular project are often at
variance and attributions differ.
1
The cur-
rent English version offers only partial
translations; the title and identication of
each sheet are still in German. It is to
be hoped that the image quality can be
improved in the future as wellcurrently
most drawings appear to be low in contrast
and cannot be enlarged to full-screen size
on the computer.
The decision to present the exhibition
in Berlins Kunstgewerbemuseum (the
home of the Kupferstichkabinett, which
houses Schinkels graphic oeuvre) probably
avoided logistical headaches and mini-
mized transportation and insurance costs.
The visitors experience, however, was
compromised by the distribution of the
display over four rooms, separated by the
museums uninspired lobby and stairwells
(built in 1981 by Rolf Gutbrod and clearly
untouched by any lessons Schinkel had to
offer). The large contiguous space of the
Hypo Kunsthalle in Munich provided a
more suitable environment.
The exhibition itself was divided into
nine chapters, beginning with Schinkels
life, family, friends, and profession, fol-
lowed by his discovery and reinvention of
historic architecture (among the reinven-
tions were his painted visions of cathedrals
on the urban periphery, not at the center).
Sections devoted to his designs for monu-
ments and for the stage, for buildings in
Berlin and for the court, and for furniture
and manufacturing followed. Schinkels
brilliant creations in Potsdam and farther
aeld received short shrift in the chapter
on his royal patrons. His late visionary
projects and the astonishingly modern
modular picture frames he designed for the
Altes Museum each merited separate con-
sideration. The exhibit concluded with an
analysis of the materiality of his drawings,
which explored papermaking technology,
as well as the dyes, inks, and drawing uten-
sils of the period.
Among the roughly three hundred
sketches, drawings, paintings, furnishings,
and furniture pieces on display, countless
delightful discoveries could be made: the
irreverent scribbles of the fteen-year-old
Karl Friedrich, his lively portraits of his
three children (on loan for the rst time
from St. Louis) and the toys he made for
them, the whimsical drawings he produced
over the years for his friend Christian
Peter Wilhelm Beuth, or his many little-
known travel sketches, decorative and fur-
niture designs, and visionary drawings.
Among his early panoramas and theater
set designs were his well-known backdrops
for Mozarts Magic Flute and many others
that conjured imaginary worlds for long-
forgotten operas by Gaspare Spontini or
Johann Nepomuk von Poissl. One of the
highlights of the exhibition was a recon-
struction of Schinkels view of the Fire of
Moscow in September 1812, displayed in
Berlin only months after news of Napo-
leons catastrophic defeat had reached
the Prussian capital. An early example of
immersive media, with a painted backdrop,
moving gurines, light and smoke effects,
and accompanying piano music, it caused a
sensation at the time. For this exhibition a
soundtrack added the clattering of hooves
on the pavement, the crackling of fire,
voices in the distance, and what sounded
like faint cries (but might have been the
squeaks of the machinery slowly pulling a
group of cutout gurines through the fore-
ground). The whole piece was a delightful
conjecture, for nothing but a small sketch
has remained of the original, and very little
is known about the actual mechanism, size,
and execution of the original.
Hein-Theodor Schulze Altcappenberg
argued in his introduction to the catalogue
that the survey of Schinkels graphic oeuvre
not only had broadened our knowledge
of this enormously talented artist but also
had uncovered countless cross connec-
tions, transformations as he termed them,
between the different media in which he
worked. In his lecture on Schinkel at the
Acadmie des Beaux-Arts in 1857, Jakob
Ignaz Hittorff mentioned the critique of
some of his Parisian colleagues that in
Schinkels work, the qualities of the painter
exert a regrettable inuence on the works of
the architect.
2
Indeed, this exhibition argued,
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EXHI BI TI ONS 157
Schinkels painting and architecture cannot
be separated; they are deeply connected
and belong to the same all-encompassing
worldview.
Many drawings, for example, demon-
strate Schinkels modern concern for the
mise-en-scne of his buildings; that is,
Schinkel represents them in an urban or
rural setting from particular angles or
viewpoints, hidden behind trees, as if seen
by distracted citizens in passing or shown,
in the luminous renderings of his friend
Eduard Grtner, as indifferent parts of
a busy street scene. Schinkel considered
himself as much a painter as an architect,
and his paintings are certainly comparable
to those of his contemporaries Caspar
David Friedrich or Carl Gustav Carus. He
dened the architects role in the broadest
sense as encompassing all the ne arts
and rening all human conditions. When,
in 1834, he reviewed his lifes work and
search for a style, he seemed to respond
to the French critique: Soon, I ended up
making the mistake of a purely radical
abstraction, where I developed the entire
concept for a particular piece of architec-
ture simply from its most trivial purpose
and from its construction. Something dry
and rigid was the result, something that
lacked freedom and entirely excluded two
essential elements: the historical and the
poetic.
3
Adopted as the title for this ambi-
tious and welcome exhibition and serving
as its leitmotif, history and poetics
helped elucidate the career of an architect
immensely more complex than he is usu-
ally assumed to be.
While the projects genesis makes
understandable the decision to present
Schinkels built work exclusively in render-
ings, visitors were left with a somewhat
limited impression of its spatial and urban
richness, its haptic and visual pleasures,
and its structural and material inventions.
There were no photographs and there was
only one model (of the Altes Museum
surprisingly made out of gleaming white
plastic), in a small section on his Berlin
buildings. Future exhibitions might ll this
lacuna, perhaps with the help of some of
the new display toolshigh- denition lm,
computer renderings, panoramic and 3-D
photographythat have emerged over the
past thirty years and are well suited to open
visitors eyes to the particular beauty of the
art of architecture.
But still, this exhibition, and the research
project it capped, have greatly enhanced
our knowledge of one of Europes most
important nineteenth-century architects.
It presented Schinkel as an enthusiastic
Weltverschnerer, a beautier of the world,
as his friend Bettina von Arnim called him
at the crucial moment when romanticism
and historicism faced the dawning indus-
trial age.
dietrich neumann
Brown University
Related Publications
Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Geschichte und Poesie,
ed. Hein-Th. Schulze Altcappenberg, Rolf
H. Johannsen, and Christiane Lange
( Berlin and Munich: Kupferstichkabinett
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Kunsthalle
der Hypo-Kulturstiftung; Hirmer Verlag,
2012), 360 pp., 382 color and 8 b/w illus.
39.99. ISBN 9783777454214
Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Geschichte und Poesie;
Das Studienbuch, ed. Hein-Th. Schulze Alt-
cappenberg and Rolf Johannsen in collabo-
ration with Anna Marie Pffin (Berlin
and Munich: KupferstichkabinettStaatliche
Museen zu Berlin; Deutscher Kunstverlag,
2012), 352 pp., 167 color and 46 b/w illus.
38.00. ISBN 9783422071636
Notes
1. It has long been known, for example, that the
famous project for a department store was a design
by Schinkels collaborator Georg Heinrich Brde
(17961865), but he is not given the appropriate
credit. See Reinhart Strecke, Schinkel, Heinrich
Brde und das Projekt eines groen Kaufhauses
unter den Linden, Jahrbuch Preuischer Kultur-
besitz, 1992, 19293. Despite Brdes detailed list
of all the drawings he made for the Altes Museum
project (reproduced here in full), he is not cred-
ited with a single one on the website.
2. Jakob Ignaz Hittorff, Notice historique de
Charles Frdric Schinkel, associ tranger de
lAcadmie, lu la sance publique annuelle
des cinq Acadmies, le 17 aot 157, Paris 1857
(quoted from Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Geschichte
und Poesie; Das Studienbuch, ed. Hein-Th. Schulze
Altcappenberg and Rolf Johannsen in collabora-
tion with Anna Marie Pffflin [Berlin and
Munich: KupferstichkabinettStaatliche Museen
zu Berlin; Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2012], 95).
Translated by the author.
3. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Gedanken, Bemerkun-
gen und Notizen ber Baukunst, in Schinkels
Nachlass (1862), A. von Wolzogen, 2:211 (quoted
from: Hein-Th. Schulze Altcappenberg, Karl
Friedrich SchinkelGeschichte und Poesie, in Karl
Friedrich Schinkel: Geschichte und Poesie, ed. Hein-
Th. Schulze Altcappenberg, Rolf H. Johannsen,
and Christiane Lange [Berlin and Munich:
KupferstichkabinettStaatliche Museen zu Ber-
lin; Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung; Hirmer
Verlag, 2012], 11). Translated by the author.
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