Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
Ohlmüller’s Mariahilfkirche outside Munich, begun in 1831 and completed
after his death by Ziebland, the next considerable essay in
ecclesiastical Gothic in Germany after Schinkel’s Berlin church, is
certainly much less appealing than is his mountain castle. The
hall-church form, authentically German though it was, produced a
clumsily proportioned mass, at the front of which a stubby tower ending
in an openwork spire seems to be ‘riding the roof’. This church is as
‘advanced’, in the sense of being fairly plausible archaeologically, as
Barthélémy’s Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours built a decade later, but that is
about all one can say for it. It certainly does not stand up to
comparison with Rickman’s or Savage’s English churches of the twenties.
De Chateauneuf’s Petrikirche in Hamburg begun in 1843, or at least its
tower, has already been mentioned (Plate 57A). This is superior in
design, and in some ways also better built, to most of Pugin’s churches
of this date. It is, for example, rib-vaulted throughout in a quite
plain but very competent way. The interior lacks, however, the
strikingly simple proportions and the warm colour of the red brick
exterior; above all, the complex spatial development of the transeptal
members lacks clarity, although the plan was probably taken over from
the medieval Petrikirche that had been burned. The Gothic churches of K.
A. von Heideloff (1788-1865), beginning with his Catholic church in
Leipzig built in the Weststrasse there in 1845-7, are hardly above the
level of Ohlmüller’s and certainly much less successful than the
Petrikirche, though Heideloff had a much higher reputation than de
Chateauneuf with contemporaries as a specialist at Gothic on account of
his published studies of medieval architecture.[144]
In Berlin most of the new churches of this period by Stüler, Strack, and
others were in a Romanesquoid version of the _Rundbogenstil_. Of these
elaborated and coarsened versions of Schinkel’s suburban-church projects
of a decade earlier, Stüler’s Jacobikirche of 1844-5 was basilican in
plan; his Markuskirche, begun in 1848, was of the central type but with
a tall campanile rising at one side. The Berlin Petrikirche, built by
Strack in 1846-50, was Gothic, however, and even clumsier than
Ohlmüller’s much earlier Mariahilfkirche, which it very closely
resembles. Nor was Stüler’s one important essay in Gothic, the
Bartholomäuskirche, begun in 1854 and completed by Friedrich Adler
(1827-?) in 1858, much better. In general, the first half of the century
was well over before Gothic churches of any great size and pretension
were built either in Germany or Austria. The largest and most prominent,
the Votivkirche in Vienna (Plate 99A), for the designing of which
Heinrich von Ferstel (1828-83) won the competition in 1853 when he was
only twenty-five, was not begun until 1856 nor completed until 1879 (see
Chapter 8).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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