Scribd
Upload
102 views2 pages

Modern Architecture Essay

Karl Friedrich Schinkel is considered a pioneer of modern architecture because of his design of the Altes Museum in Berlin in the 1830s. The museum helped establish the new trend of Neo-Classicism after the Napoleonic era. Schinkel's design departed from Durand's typological methods to create a delicate yet powerful spatial articulation, with a wide peristyle that leads to a symmetrical entry stair. Mies van der Rohe's design of Crown Hall at IIT in the 1950s was influenced by Schinkel's Altes Museum, returning to its tradition with a centralized composition, though not with the usual hierarchical Palladian organization. While evoking Neo-Classicism, Crown Hall

Uploaded by

Jacqueline12 Lin
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
102 views2 pages

Modern Architecture Essay

Karl Friedrich Schinkel is considered a pioneer of modern architecture because of his design of the Altes Museum in Berlin in the 1830s. The museum helped establish the new trend of Neo-Classicism after the Napoleonic era. Schinkel's design departed from Durand's typological methods to create a delicate yet powerful spatial articulation, with a wide peristyle that leads to a symmetrical entry stair. Mies van der Rohe's design of Crown Hall at IIT in the 1950s was influenced by Schinkel's Altes Museum, returning to its tradition with a centralized composition, though not with the usual hierarchical Palladian organization. While evoking Neo-Classicism, Crown Hall

Uploaded by

Jacqueline12 Lin
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Jacqueline Yuvia Utami

2201768235
LA44

MODERN ARCHITECTURE ESSAY


Why K. Frampton regarded the German Architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel as a
pioneer of modern architecture and why his Altes Museum Berlin in creating the new
trend of Neo-Clasicism?
After the Revolution, the evolution of Neo-Classicism was largely inseparable
from the need ti accommodate the new institution of bourgeois society and to
represent the emergence of the new republican state. That these forces were initially
resolved in the compromise of constitutional monarchy hardly detracted from the role
that Neo-Classicism played in the formation of the bourgeois imperialist style. The
creation of Napoleon’s ‘Style Empire’ in Paris and Frederick II’s Francophile
‘Kulturnation’ in Berlin are but separate manifestations of the same cultural tendency.
The former made an eclectic use of antique motifs, be they Roman, Greek or
Egyptian, to create the instant heritage of a republican dynasty - a style that revealed
itself significantly in the theatrical tented interiors of the Napoleonic campaigns and
in the solid Roman embellishments of the capital city, such as Percier and Fontaine’s
Rue de Rivoli and Arc du Carrousel and Gondoin’s Armȇe.

In Germany, the tendency was first manifested in Carl Gotthard Langhans’s


Brandenburg Gate, built as the the western entry to Berlin 1793, and in Friedrich the
Great, of 1797. Ledoux’s primary forms inspired Gilly to emulate the severity of the
Doric, thereby echoing the ‘archaic’ power of the Stum und Drang movement in
German literature. Like his contemporary Friedrich Weinbrenner, he projected a
spartan Ur-civilization of high moral value, with which to celebrate the myth of the
ideal Prussian state. His remarkable monument would have taken form Potsdam
through a squat triumphal arch capped by a quadriga.

Friedrich Gilly colleague and successor, the Prussian architect Karl Friedrich
Schinkel, acquired his early enthusiasm for Gothic not from Berlin or Paris, but from
his own first-hand experience of Italian cathedrals. Yet after the defeat of Napoleon in
1815, this Romantic taste was largely eclipsed by the need to find and appropriate
expression for the triumph of Prussian Nationalism. The combination of ‘political
idealism’ and ‘military prowess’ seems to have demanded a return to the Classic. In
any event this was the style that linked Schinkel not only to Gilly but also to Durand,
in the creation od his masterpieces in Berlin; his Neue Wache of 1816, his
Schauspielhaus of 1821 and his Altes Museum of 1830. while both the guard house
and the theater show characteristic features of Schinkel’s mature style, the massive
corners of the one and the mullioned wings of the other, the influence of Durand is
most clearly revealed in the museum, which is a prototypical museum plan taken from
Piȇcȋs and split in half - a transformation in which the central rotunda, peristyle and
courtyards are retained and the side wings eliminated. While the wide entry steps the
peristyle and the eagles and Dioscuri on the roof symbolized the cultural aspirations
of the Prussian state. Schinkel departed from the typological and representational
methods of Durand to create a spatial articulation of extraordinary delicacy and
power, as the wide peristyle gives way to a narrow portico containing a symmetrical
entry stair and its mezzanine (an arrangement which would be remembered by Mies
van de Rohe).

The Altes Museum Berlin design was analytical compared by Mies van de Rohe
design of Crown Hall - IIT Chicago 1952-1966.
The latter must still be regarded as his final Suprematist statement. Unbuilt, this
18-metre (60-foot) high, marble-panelled, lattice-braced, steel frame structure,
elevated 6 metres (20-feet) above the ground, would have enclosed an assembly hall
roofed by a space-frame with the colossal clear span of 220 metres (720-feet).
Crown Hall, designed at about the same time as the Mannheim Theatre, was a
decisive return to the tradition of Schinkel and in-particular to Schinkel’s Atles
Museum in Berlin, always admired by Mies. This Schinkelschȗer type-form is
generally evident as an organizing paradigm throughout Mies’s work of the late
1960s, from the Bacardi Building in Mexico City (1963) to the School of Social
Service Administration at the University of Chicago (1965). Needles to say, the
programme could not always be appropriately accommodated within such a simple
paradigm. Thus, where the School of Social Service with its centralized library to the
rear permitted a more or less direct transposition of the portico entry and rotunda of
the Altes Museum. Crown Hall could but barely reflect these constituent elements and
then only at the expense of the programme.
Colin Rowe has argued that the whole evolution of the International Style in
architecture was profoundly affected by a conceptual schism between centripetal and
centrifugal space, the one stemming from Palladianism and the other ultimately
deriving from the anti-monumentality of Wright’s extension of the English Free Style
plan. This schism, Rowe claims, is demonstrated in Crown Hall (significantly enough,
the IIT school of architecture) where the 67 x 37-metre (220 x 120-foot) span glazed
box does not afford an unequivocal reading of it’s centralized composition. As Rowe
has written:
“Like the characteristic Palladian composition, Crown Hall is a symmetrical
and, probably, a mathematically regulated volume. But, unlike the characteristic
Palladian composition, it is not a hierarchically ordered organization which projects
its centralized theme vertically in the form of a pyramidal roof or dome. Unlike the
Villa Rotonda, but like so many of the composition of the Twenties, Crown Hall is
provided with no effective central area within which the observer can stand and
comprehend the whole. . . once inside, rather than any spatial climax, the building
offers a central solid, not energetically stated. It is true, but still an isolated core
around which the travels laterally with the enclosing windows.”

So, in other word, Mies van de Rohe design of Crown Hall have a modern
International Style of building, not a Neo-Classicism type of building and used
Palladian composition but not like the usual palldian composition, and Altes Museum
in Berlin have a Neo-Classicism concept and styled that have the combination of
‘political idealism’ and ‘military prowess’ seems to have demanded a return to the
Classic.

You might also like