Never again would any ruler, however, not even in Germany, be so spendthrift a patron of architecture. Considering the deterioration in quality evident in these palaces and castles of the seventies and eighties from the work done for Ludwig’s predecessor Ludwig I or for Frederick William IV of Prussia in the thirties and forties, this was just as well. Fortunately the activities of William II were less related to the building arts; and Hitler, a thwarted architect, had too little time. Far more typical of the turn German architecture in general was taking in the seventies than the Ludwigsschlösser were such things as the von Tiele house in Berlin by Gustav Ebe (1834-1916) and Julius Benda (1838-97). In its crawlingly rich German Renaissance detail and its irregularly gabled silhouette this prepared the way far more definitely than Raschdorf’s contemporary Cologne buildings for a veritable flood of such coarse work all over Germany in the next decade. This characteristic German mode has analogies with the English style-phase of the seventies and eighties somewhat perversely known as ‘Queen Anne’; more specifically it often resembles very closely what is called ‘Pont Street Dutch’ in England. But leadership comparable to that provided in England by Webb and Shaw was entirely lacking, and even lesser talent of the order of George’s or Collcutt’s (see Chapter 12). Usually executed in dark-coloured brick with stone trim, this prime manifestation of the bourgeois ambitions of the Bismarckian Empire produced a spate of buildings of all sorts that have come to look very grim indeed with the accumulated smoke of years. Old photographs indicate that many of them once had a certain lightness and even a quite festive air, Wagnerian in the _Meistersinger_ vein rather than in that of the _Ring_ as at Neuschwanstein. But the materials used were always hard and mechanically handled and the execution of the detail at once fussy and metallic. No positive originality in general composition or in planning made up, as with much comparable work in England, for the anti-architectonic character of the basic approach. A prominent late example is the Rathaus[205] in Hamburg built in 1886-97. This vast and turgid edifice contrasts most unhappily with the suave High Renaissance design of Wimmel & Forsmann’s contiguous Exchange built in the thirties. Its tall tower, moreover, has neither the richness of outline of Scott’s on the Nikolaikirche nor the simple directness of de Chateauneuf’s on the Petrikirche, with both of which it still disputes the central position on the Hamburg skyline.