Rand Carter on Karl Friedrich Schinkel

“Schinkel's aesthetic was not a crudely materialistic "truth to material" affair… but rather an attempt to inform iron and other industrial materials with an appropriate beauty through the direct collaboration of the artist in the manufacturing process.”

“Schinkel was not arbitrary in his use of historical modes but rather eclectic in the best sense of the word. He could search the past for its conspicuous successes using them both freely and discursively as the basis for a contemporary architecture.”

“Schinkel had asserted that architecture should be the expression of an idea, and, that insofar as it represented a transcendence of the intellectual over purely material considerations, the Gothic style was the best example of an architectural expression of ideas. Yet, as it happened over the next several generations Gothic was capable of expressing a variety of ideas, often contradictory. It could, for example, express the ultimate victory of spirit over matter, an architectural system "organically" related to nature, or the most logical and efficient use of masonry. It was both the visible expression of the Germanic soul and an ideal vehicle for Catholic worship. If similar forms could express such a variety of ideas, was it also possible that a variety of forms could express similar ideas? That meaning was not intrinsic in the forms but rather attached to them by tacit agreement and confirmed by the specific context? Although it is true that the Gothic Monument to the Wars of Liberation was in a "national" style while the Museum dedicated to universal cultural history was in a timeless "international" style, there is also the particular location of each building to consider: a suburban hilltop for the former and the center of the city with its monumental classical buildings for the latter. Schinkel approached each particular problem on its own terms, and this freedom from a self-consistent but doctrinaire method contributed to his success as a practicing architect even if it makes it difficult to reconstruct his "theory of architecture."”

“Ironically, the belief that the new age was essentially different from the past led to the emotional need to find "roots" in the past, to find some continuity with man's great achievements of the past. The unprecedented nature of so many of the architectural tasks and the altered conditions for their realization inevitably produced originality at the level of planning and construction; but as the Romantic architect and, indeed, sensible men realized, man is an emotional creature who needs to be reassured by the familiar and the intelligible. It is a measure of Schinkel's genius that he could provide such functional solutions to particular problems, clothe them in intelligible and expressive forms, incorporate them so felicitously into their environment, and make it all seem so natural and inevitable.”