bauakademie as a design debt
The dialectical principle is the true formative principle of Schinkel's work, the first lesson to be drawn from it. It speaks of the intellectual unity of things in their formal diversity. (O.M. Ungers. 1981)
When, in 1832, Karl Friedrich Schinkel1 placed the volume of the new building hosting the Berlin’s school of architecture, and other functions connected to the township building department, inside the urban layout refined by him in the 1817 and 1823 plans, he carried out an exercise of memory. This exercise is reflected in the building as a synthesis and a culmination of a rapidly changing path. The German architect had the opportunity to tackle it on the basis of a matured theoretical reflection, explicated and measured through the construction of the main achievements in Berlin over the past fifteen years. Schinkel’s contribution to the European architectural scene is analyzed in this short essay according to three main elements: attention to construction methods even before language standards; continuous typological reflection on buildings; exercise of memory as a composite material. It is thanks to not only the study of the master Alois Hirt’s work and its travel accounts, but also the strong influence from David’s and Friedrich Gilly’s activity that in 1803 the young Schinkel undertook the first two-year journey in Italy. Twenty years later, he would travel for the second time searching for a refinement on the museum role with regard to the contemporary construction of the Altes Museum by the Lustgarten. These two travels impressed in the memory of the German architect, thanks to the role of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and the landscape painter Jakob Philipp Hackert, a direct knowledge of Italian classical architecture with Greek, Roman - through the ancient ruins -, Medieval and Renaissance influences. This training, which completed the academic one, was undertaken by Schinkel through a careful anatomical study of the buildings and the landscapes he visited. It was accomplished through life and painted drawings, imaginary drawings set in a real context or real architecture placed out of context2. Being out of context exactly represents one of the most relevant aspects of the journey the architect made with his colleague Johann Gottfried Steinmeyer at the age of twenty-two, even if grounding the artwork in context is one of the most important lessons learned by David Gilly. From Oswald Zoeggler’s point of view, what Schinkel describes and draws is not the reality of the journey but almost a parallel journey above reality, a journey already imagined, a journey closer to mythology than any other time3. Even from Luciano
