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
The Karlsruhe Marktplatz stands as one of the happiest ensembles of the
early nineteenth century, happy not alone because Weinbrenner, who first
conceived it, was able to carry it to final completion before
architectural fashions had begun to change, but even more because that
first conception dated back to the most vigorous period of the
architectural revolution in Germany and was not notably diluted by the
more pedestrian standards of later days (Plate 10A). In detail, perhaps,
the original designs for the individual buildings were bolder; but the
ideal of a public square, not walled in in the Baroque way but defined
by discrete blocks, balanced but not identical, and focused by the
eye-catching diagonals of the central pyramid, a geometric shape as pure
as the cube or the sphere yet also an established formal symbol and a
subtle memory of the Egyptian past, was fully realized (Figure 1).
Outside the Marktplatz, except perhaps in the Rondellplatz with its
central obelisk, Weinbrenner’s work is more provincial though in a very
distinguished way. Here and there, moreover, a pointed arch or a touch
of asymmetry showed his early response to the contemporary currents of
the Picturesque.
Weinbrenner’s death in 1826 and the succession as State architect of
Baden of his pupil Heinrich Hübsch (1795-1863) provides a natural break
in the Romantic Classical story at just that point when the rise of new
ideals began to make the more Classical side of Romantic Classicism out
of date—in 1828 Hübsch himself published a characteristic essay, _In
welchem Styl sollen wir bauen?_, a question to which the answers were
increasingly various, and rarely the Classical style. Elsewhere in
Germany, and notably in Bavaria, where the Wittelsbachs, raised to
kingship while in alliance with Napoleon, were also the most culturally
ambitious rulers of a post-Napoleonic state, there is no such sharp
break. Leo von Klenze, born in 1784 in Hildesheim, lived until 1864; his
Munich Propylaeon, completed only the year before his death and begun as
late as 1846, is by no means the least Grecian of his works. Klenze (he
was ennobled by his royal patron) had studied in Paris under the Empire
not only under Durand at the École Polytechnique but also with Percier.
In 1805 he had visited the other two main sources of up-to-date
architectural inspiration, Italy with its Classical ruins and its
Renaissance palaces, and England with its own early version of Romantic
Classicism and its various illustrations of the Picturesque. In 1808
Napoleon’s brother Jerome, then King of Westphalia, who was already
employing A.-H.-V. Grandjean de Montigny (1776-1850), had made the
twenty-four-year-old Paris-trained German his court architect; in 1814
Maximilian I called him to Munich.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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