The relative importance of Berlin was, of course, rising well before its establishment as the imperial capital in 1871. Friedrich Hitzig’s most considerable public building in Berlin, the Exchange, built in 1859-63 at the same time that the Rathaus was in construction, was neither Schinkelesque nor _Rundbogenstil_ but in a rather academic sort of Late Baroque (Plate 77A). Hitzig seems to have been consciously recalling what Knobelsdorf built for Frederick the Great and thus presaging the more overt Neo-Baroque of the last decades of the century. His later Reichsbank of 1871-6, on the other hand, was in general considerably more Classical despite its banded and diapered walls in two colours of brick. The public buildings of Martin K. P. Gropius (1824-80) are also indicative of the general stylistic stasis of this period in Germany. His Museum of Decorative Art in Berlin, begun in 1877 and completed in 1881 by Heinrich Schmieden (1835-1913), resembled Hitzig’s houses of the fifties in its Grecian elaboration; it also recalled Klenze’s Hermitage Museum, built more than a generation earlier in Petersburg. Gropius & Schmieden’s still later Gewandhaus in Leipzig of 1880-4, however, is less reminiscent of Schinkel or Klenze and more conventionally academic. This concert hall was renowned for its superb acoustics. It is easy to forget how much the architects of these decades, apparently obsessed with stylistic elaboration, were also concerned to incorporate in their buildings all sorts of technical advances. Iron may show less than in the previous period, but it was quite consistently used behind the scenes. Central heating, extensive sanitary equipment, vertical transportation, and various other things that are taken for granted today first became accepted necessities in these decades. But it was only in the commercial field—and in England and the United States above all—that such technical innovations influenced architecture very positively or visibly (see Chapter 14), however much they must actually have preoccupied architects who seem today so imitative and retardataire. The Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin by Franz Schwechten (1841-1924), however, built in 1872-80, did represent a real advance over the principal English railway station of this period, St Pancras in London of 1863-76, in the clarity and coherence of its organization. One can hardly say that the shed roof of the Anhalter Bahnhof was in the _Rundbogenstil_; yet it is much more happily related in scale and shape to the masonry elements of the station than are the two parts of that in London, world-famous nonetheless until the nineties for the unrivalled span of its shed.