11 - Influences of German Idealism on nineteenth-century architectural theory: Schelling and Leo von Klenze

Summary

I.

In nineteenth-century Germany, architectural thought was ‘subject to profoundly heterogeneous influences; philosophy and aesthetics took a novel and decisive position with regard to architecture, and this was reflected in theory’. The source of the decisive influence of philosophy on contemporary architectural theory can be found in the Berlin Academy of Architecture, which was the most significant institution for the training of future architects in the German-speaking world. The key figure was Friedrich Gilly (1772–1800), who lectured at the Academy on optics and perspective. His father, David Gilly (1748–1808), had founded the Academy in 1799 and was primarily interested in the technical and constructive aspects of architecture. He was therefore ideologically closer to the Paris École polytechnique, which specialised in engineering, than to the aesthetically oriented École des beaux-arts.

Friedrich Gilly, in his essay ‘Some Thoughts on the Necessity of Endeavouring to Unify the Various Departments of Architecture in Both Theory and Practice’ (1799), offers a veiled criticism of the exclusive focus on construction technology in the Academy of Architecture, whose curriculum was directed towards the Prussian Government's building programme, and was therefore hardly appropriate to the remit of an architecture of ideas. He argues for technical-aesthetic integrity in the training of future architects, and to this end invokes the philosopher Karl Heinrich Heydenreich (1764–1801) on the justification of architecture as a type of art that is both independent and necessary for man's aesthetic cultivation. For Heydenreich, this presupposed the unambiguous inclusion of architecture in the system of fine arts. Such a status was allowed to architecture only with qualifications, because of the mechanical and functional elements peculiar to it. Its antithesis was seen to be poetry. Since, in terms of what it is possible to conceive, imagination knows no limits, poetry usually occupied the highest position in the contemporary system of the arts. The worthlessness of architecture was vociferously emphasised by art historians such as Christian Ludwig Stieglitz (1756–1836) and Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–79).