The directory «Artists»
Schinkel Karl Friedrich
(1781—1841)
Schinkel was the most prominent architect of neoclassicism in Prussia. Born in Neuruppin (Brandenburg), he lost his father at the age of six in Neuruppin's disastrous fire. He became a student of Friedrich Gilly (1772-1800) and his father, David Gilly, in Berlin. After returning to Berlin from his first trip to Italy in 1805, he started to earn his living as a painter. When he saw Caspar David Friedrich's painting «Monk looking at the sea» (Der Mönch am Meer) at the 1810 Berlin art exhibition he decided that he would never reach such a mastership in painting and definitely turned to architecture. After Napoleon's defeat, Schinkel oversaw the Prussian Building Commission. In this position, he was not only responsible for reshaping the still relatively unspectacular city of Berlin into a representative capital for Prussia, but also oversaw projects in the expanded Prussian territories spanning from the Rhineland in the West to Königsberg in the East. Schinkel's Museum or Altes Museum on Museum Island (1823-1830). Schinkel, however, is noted as much for his theoretical work and his architectual drafts as for the relatively few buildings that were actually executed to his designs. Maybe his merits are best shown in his unexecuted plans for the transformation of the athenian Acropolis into a royal palace for the new Kingdom of Greece and for the erection of the Orianda Palace in the Crimea. These and other designs may be studied in his Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe (1820-1837) and his Werke der höheren Baukunst (1840-1842; 1845-1846). Schinkel's Neues Schauspielhaus ("New Theatre"), BerlinIt has been speculated, however, that due to the difficult political circumstances – French occupation and later the dependency on less-than-capable Prussian kings – and his relatively early death, which prevented him from seeing the explosive German industrialization in the second half of the 19th century, he did not even live up to the true potential exhibited by his sketches.
Berlin, 1981, Kreuzberg War Memorial
Burundi, 1984, Brandenburg Gate
Cooê Islands, 1984, Olympic Games Poster 1936
Ghana, 1992, Brandenburg gate
Grenada, 1988, Zeppelin over Brandenburg Gate
German Federal Republic, 1997.03.15, 
Berlin. K. F. Schinkel, Brandenburg Gate
