Berlin Schulte-Peevers and Parkinson Call

Berlin

Schulte-Peevers and Parkinson call the middle of the seventeenth century "Berlin's first architectural heyday," (41). The finish of the Thirty Years' War led to a "period of absolutism…when central European feudal rulers asserted their power by building grand residences," (Shulte-Peevers and Parkinson 41). Friedrich Wilhelm organized massive urban expansion projects, and his son Friedrich III extended the architectural visions of his father especially after he crowned himself King Friedrich I of Prussia.

Known as the Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm adopted earlier structures to suit his grandiose visions such as the manor house he turned into a hunting lodge, which later on became Schloss Tegel. The Great Elector's urban expansion projects also included the creation of three new neighborhoods in the city as well as a walled fortification for the city (Shulte-Peevers and Parkinson 41). Even before Friedrich III became King, he undertook similar projects as his father: such as reconstructing a city square in the Baroque style (Egert-Romanowska and Omilanowska 69). Baroque ornamentalism and Gesamtkunstwerk (the fusion of art, decoration, and architecture) characterized seventeenth century Berlin architectural development and design sensibility.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel was one of Berlin's most notable architects and made a strong impact on the city's structures during the early nineteenth century. Schinkel was appointed as Surveyor to the Prussian Building Commission, and he "redesigned the city with a series of buildings that expressed Prussia's cultural ambitions and national pride," (Matthews). Schinkel's architectural style favored Greek classicism, which was in part a deliberate divergence from the French style that prevailed when France ruled Prussia (Matthews).

The Baroque style came back into vogue during the late nineteenth century in Berlin. Julius Carl and Otto Raschdorff constructed the Berliner Dom in a neo-Baroque style, also incorporating Renaissance elements and is reminiscent of St. Peter's basilica in the Vatican even though it is a Protestant church (Senate Department for Urban Development). The Berliner Dom is imposing, echoing the budding character of unified Germany at the turn of the century.

Modernism made its mark on Berlin's architectural trends, too. The Bauhaus style of modernism is characteristic of many of Berlin's social housing projects that sprouted up in the 1920s, and which recently became designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The early twentieth century marked the birth of the Weimar Republic, which gave rise to an industrial aesthetic that has become a hallmark of Berlin's look as well as symbolic of socialist ideology (Hake). For example, the Potzdammer Platz was conceived of as a symbolic collective space, a sentimental communal property made manifest in a massive public square.