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
In Sweden the Rome-trained French architect Desprez, whose projects of
the 1780s have been mentioned, was largely occupied not with building
but with theatre settings; however, there is at least the excellent
Botanical Institute that he built in Uppsala, designed in 1791 and
completed in 1807, with its characteristic Greek Doric portico and plain
wall surfaces. More notable was his grandiose project, also of 1791, for
the Haga Slott in the form of a very long peripteral temple with an
octastyle pedimented portico projecting in the middle of the side. But
Sweden saw no such monumental example of Romantic Classicism carried to
execution. Typical of actual production is the country house at
Stjamsund built in 1801 by C. F. Sundahl (1754-1831); this is more
English than French in character, indeed with its plain rectangular mass
and central portico almost literally Anglo-Palladian.
Harassed and recurrently conquered or _gleichgeschaltet_ though most of
the German states were in the Napoleonic Wars (while Sweden eventually
received a Napoleonic marshal as sovereign through the testament of her
legitimate ruler) there was much more building altogether in these years
of the turn of the century in Germany than in Sweden, or indeed in
France, much of it of high quality. The frontispiece to Romantic
Classicism in Germany is the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, built in
1789-93 by K. G. Langhans (1733-1808). Still somewhat attenuated and
un-Grecian in its proportions, this is the first of the Doric ceremonial
gateways that were to be so characteristic of Romantic Classicism
everywhere and also one of the most complex and original in composition.
More ponderous and provincial is Langhans’s Potsdam theatre of 1795; but
the Stadttheater at Danzig of 1798-1801 by Held, the City Architect, a
cube with a Doric temple portico and a low saucer dome, follows a more
Ledolcian paradigm.
David Gilly (1748-1808) was a more advanced Berlin architect than the
elderly Langhans; but his best work of these years is the Viewegsches
Haus in Brunswick of 1801-5 with its smooth stucco wall-planes, boldly
incised ornament, and Greek Doric porch. More elegantly French is
another Brunswick house of this period, the free-standing Villa Holland
of 1805 by P. J. Krahe (1758-1840).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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