The Singakademie in Berlin of 1822 and a large house in Charlottenburg for the banker Behrend, on the other hand, are very accomplished exercises in a rigidly Classical mode such as his French contemporaries were currently essaying with markedly less elegance of proportion. The Zivilcasino in Potsdam, begun the next year, where an awkward site forced—or perhaps merely justified—an asymmetrical juxtaposition of the parts, illustrated an aspect of Schinkel’s talent that is particularly significant to his twentieth-century admirers: the imposition of coherent geometrical order upon an edifice markedly irregular in its massing. This was something the English were only playing at in these years when they designed Picturesque Italian Villas such as Nash’s Cronkhill or loosely composed Castellated Mansions such as Gwrych (Plate 49). It is characteristic of Romantic Classicism that Schinkel’s masterpiece—and, with Soane’s later Bank interiors, the masterpiece of the period—should be a museum. The Altes Museum, designed in 1823 and built in 1824-8, faces the Schloss across the Lustgarten, to which Schinkel’s just completed Schlossbrücke gave a dignified new approach. The Museum quite outranked his rather undistinguished cathedral; yet at first glance it may seem one of the least original and most tamely archaeological of Romantic Classical buildings (Plate 13). Substituting for the paradigm of the pedimented peripteral temple that of the stoa, Schinkel evidently counted on the prestige of a giant Grecian order to impress his contemporaries, quite as Brongniart had done at the Paris Bourse (Plate 8B). But the Museum retains the admiration of a twentieth century usually bored, and even shocked, by such stylophily because of the extraordinary logic and elegance of its total organization. The frontal plane of superbly detailed Ionic columns is not weak at the corners, as colonnades seen against the light generally are, for here spur walls ending in antae firmly enframe the long, unbroken range. And if this frontal columnar plane is unbroken—and also seems to deny by its giant scale the fact that this is a two-storey structure—within the dark of the portico, made darker and more Romantic by a richly coloured mural designed by Schinkel and executed under the direction of Peter Cornelius, one soon becomes aware of a recessed oblong where a double flight of stairs leads to the upper storey. Moreover, lest this façade be read, like a stoa, as no more than a portico, there rises over the centre, still farther to the rear, a rectangular attic. [Illustration: Figure 6. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: Berlin, Altes Museum, 1824-8 section ]