Travel sketches of Schinkel: on the british trail of twentieth century architecture

A lot of things have been said about the origin of the Modern Movement. Having as a
reference the Mansilla’s book: "Travel sketches within the time", this paper shows how
it is possible to see beyond. We start with historical proposals about these origins and
take a travel sketch book of Schinkel to England in 1826, edited by Bindman and
Riemann. Notes and sketches drive us until nowadays through a quote by Vincent
Scully about Kahn's work, where by through a comparation between Schinkel and Kahn
we see the English roots of the Modern Movement and the humanization of architecture.
England, Schinkel, Kahn

Fig 1. Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat by Oskar Kokoschka.

In 1909, a young Oskar Kokoschka, aged 23, received a commission from the historian and contemporary
art precursors Hans and Erica Tietze to paint a personal portrait, which is now owned by MoMA. In 1950,
celebrating Hans 70th birthday, a commemorative volume was made, which Paul Zucker contributed to.
Its abstract resulted in an article: The Paradox of Architectural Theory at the Begining of “Modern
Movement”, (Zucker 1951) which builds on the framework that set the bases of the Modern Movement.
Schinkel, Semper and Bötticher apear as teachers of reference for learning for new generations of
architecture students in Germany. Schinkel represents the union of purpose, material and technique. We
can see functionalism traits hidden behind an eclectic classicism in the interest of their construction
details. But for Zucker, Semper represents the Proto-Renaissance for a later functionalism whith his idea
of “style” of an architecture “true” in which form, influenced by the construction and material, took into
account socio-economic, cultural and climatic conditions. Still, folowing Zucker's speech, but taking a
different view, the real pioneers of the new theories come, the theorists of architecture: Woelfflin,
Schmarsow, and Adolf Von Hildebrand.
Interest is thus moved from an interest in form, material, technique and function to the aesthetic qualities
of space and its display, volume and shape. Architects and theorists agreed on the emergence of
functionalism and the rejection of eclecticism. Moreover, Zucker argues that it is not surprising that the
new movement has departed from the rejection to eclecticism and the constant references to classical
Greek and Roman teachings received from the great masters. For Zucker, Adolf Loos was the first
modern architect, then Peter Behrens, Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius came and continued functionalism.
In 1914 the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne, secured a primacy of functionalism. It leaned heavily on the
work of the French, Eiffel and Perret, and the American School of Chicago, along with Sullivan,
Richardson and Frank Lloyd Wright.
But, Zucker at no time refers to the Schinkel's Bauakademie, built between 1832 and 1836. In 1950 it still
stood before being demolished in 1962. Where had this singular building come from? And if at some
point it has been recognized as a precursor to the Modern Movement, who were its disciples? Zucker, in
the article cited for the Modernism notes several of his influences as German, French, American and,
Greek and Roman classics. But there may be other sources? This paper starts with the discovery of a
travelogue of England that Schinkel makes in 1826 and in addition a note found in the book of Vincent
Scully, Louis I Kahn, (Scully 1962, 23) which reveals that Schinkel influenced Kahn.

From the classical roots of Modernism

To the Mount Acuto, where the monastery of Certosa of Florence is set, you need to climb on a scooter
just like any other resident of the closest village of Galluzo to attend the 11 o'clock Sunday mass. From
the fragility of a scooter everything feels different; volumes are accentuated, small things seem smaller
and large volumes increase their scale. As we approach, the vast watchtower that shapes the whole seems
to invade everything. Going up the slope that leads to the entrance it allows us to explore a medieval
building, which now belongs to Le Corbu only: “I have found the solution to the working class house in
only type.” Wrote Le Corbusier to his parents. Years later he recognised that the visit changed his life
(Mansilla 2002, 217). The site was the Monastery of the Certosa di Firenze, and the solution he found was
in the cells of the cloistered monks. The future was the Modern Movement. A young Le Corbusier, which
at that time still did not know what it was called, discovered in Florence, in a monastery of the fourteenth
century, the work of those who would teach the steps of the Modern Movement that were later applied in
Marseilles Housing Unit. We meet at that place both, at the same time. We meet them following the
concept of “time” Mansilla.
In the book Travel notes inside time, Mansilla enjoys following the trips made by modern architects.
Those architects who did not yet know that in the future they would be known as representatives of the
Vanguard and the Modern Movement. These trips, according to tradition began in Italy, but from there
new expeditions were made to both Greece and Egypt, and in cases like that of Le Corbusier to the
“East”. An architect could not complete their training if they had not traveled to the birthplace of Western
civilization. This is something that Louis Kahn throughout his years of teaching, tirelessly repeated to his
students at Yale and Princeton. The classical architecture of Greece and Rome eventually become a source
of inspiration for all those who came into contact with her.
But the book goes further delving into the characters. Investigatinge what they did during those years,
especially their drawings. The drawing is a useful tool for “thinking images” and Mansilla knows that.
But Mansilla also talks about emotions and feelings by referring to the drawings, the drawing for him
suggests the author's own emotions and the emotions triggered in the observer. The thrill of drawing as
the excitement of life.
The story of the Modern Movement is full of protagonists, painters who felt artists such as those around
at the time of Michelangelo's Renaissance, were better painters than architects. Not only were Behrens,
Le Corbusier and Kahn artists, so too was Schinkel.

From British roots of Modernism

The Westminster Reference Library is in London, in the 35th building on the narrow street of St Martin,
south of Leicester Square. The same place where the house of Newton had been until 1913. She has, like
any library something magical and special. When we are in it we can feel that the story and thoughts of
mankind are at hand, but it is also a place of worship where we could feel comfortable in slippers. The
very mixed selection of researchers that we find there who are absorbed in their books and thoughts,
encourages us to suspect that it would indeed be difficult to find a place where time has stopped as it has
here. There is nothing more that the soul of the books arranged on the shelves. A book caught our
attention: Karl Friedrich Schinkel “The English Journey”. A journal of a visit to France and Britain in
1826. Our interest in Schinkel mean this book quickly grabs our attention. At that moment, the world
stopped and the library disappeared.
Twenty years ago, on July 28, 1993, David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann edited the annotations of
Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The book contains notes and sketches extracted from a small notebook and
letters sent from the architect to his wife during the months of absence. The English Journey won the
historical book prize, issued by the American Institute of Architects at the time. Among Riemann's
passion for the original document and Bindman's surprise at finding it, interest in the document, which is
saved at the National Gallery is accompanied by an interest in the people who brought it to light. This
makes the manuscript itself an object of study and moves ones interest towards the people who made her
publication possible. We rarely have the opportunity to find such an interesting item, since the careful
transcription of the text is combined with the author's intentions, which wasn't to publish it. The richness
of the find lies in the technical imputs, which are surprising for a German architect, and will amend their
architectural codes dramatically. But on the other hand it allows us to approach the human side of his
character. Between his drawings and descriptions of constructive solutions he gives us private particles
that bring us closer to the human being, the knight-errant with artist sensitivity.
The drawings and handwritten notes allow us to deepen our search for the origins of the Modern
Movement, entering the humanization of architecture while we're cruising between historical events that
have been successively joined.

From the technological development to the social inequality

The journal drawings were created in haste. It is called freehand drawing. It becomes a style that captures
what the eye sees as an intellectual discipline and as a work tool. The volatility of the “snapshot” focuses
on fixing the data that will help with the transcription of the object in another environment. The hand of a
fantastic draughtsman, such as Schinkel, seems clumsy, slow and not very decisive, but the design
incorporates a novel approach to an old problem.
We show here a quick sketch of the steel casing of the Maudslay's workshop: Schinkel showed more
enthusiam for this cover than the Bank of England by Soane.

Fig. 02.Truss from the Maudslay's workshop (Bindman, Riemann. 1993, 80)

The sketch contains a truss I-section, as seen in the double solid line that runs along the top and bottom
edge of the piece. The metallic structures started to become popular after the fires at the old wooden
textile factories. The structures were calculated under trial and error, and Henry Maudslay's workshop
was highly inspiring to Schinkel.
Support points, marked in bold, show graphically his interest in solving the problem of the balance of the
structure. The centerpiece is the most clearly drawn feature, summarizing his analysis of the whole.
Already in 1757 Euler had found the formula that defines the theory of critical load for slender columns
which can also be applied to the section of I-beams, where buckling is inversely proportional to the
moment of inertia of the section. In an attempt to ward off the material from the center of gravity of the
piece, Maudslay had also pierced the middle of the web with óculos, displacing the workpiece’s mass
away from its natural axis. As Kahn said on Monumentality in 1944 (Twombly, 2003, 24) the I-beam is an
engineering achievement and the pillars must be hollow. Schinkel in Maudslay's workshop, scored the
thin steel columns which supported the roof of one of the rooms and also functioned as an outlet for
sewage.
Schinkel tells his wife that the Industrial Revolution brought to Manchester 400 cotton mills, some larger
than the Royal Palace in Berlin, saw the population quadruple; giving rise to speculation and market
saturation, and caused thousands of people who were without work to be piled on the streets. Those who
had jobs worked 16 hours a day for only two shillings a week. Schinkel was concerned. Like Kahn, he
was worried about the social needs and the dignity of man, as an individual and as a social being.
Going back to Germany, the industrial backwardness, when compared to England, means the production
of iron pillars was uneconomical so these were built in brick. In addition, the simple and clean facade of
Bauakademie allows for a structural reading of Kahn's tastes. The Bauakademie is built in typical English
red brick, the brick which inspired Kahn.

Fig. 03. Manchester, Panoramic view of Old Town and cotton mills (Bindman, Riemann. 1993, 177)

From the brick to the interest by environment

Kahn was a strange guy, the kind of eccentric genius that only the British could take seriously. When
British architect Allison Smithson asked Kahn what he had done in the '30s, Kahn replied that he had
lived in a town called Le Corbusier (Barker 1992). The same le Corbusier where on his trip to Germany,
he met Schinkel's work through the teachings of professor Peter Behrens, their boss in Berlin, as well as
Gropius and Mies; in the city of the Bauakademie. Le Corbusier was very impressed about everything in
Italy (Le Corbusier 1987, 135), but on March 1st 1911, he recognized that in Germany his dream had
became reality thanks to the comprension of the classic genius(Gresleri 1984, 391) . There, he decided for
Schinkel (Brooks 1997, 253).
Vincent Scully refers to Schinkel at the work of Kahn, stating that both Philip Johnson and many others
realized the proximity between the two, when the unbuilt projects of Adler and De Vore houses in
Perspecta 3, in 1955 were published (Scully 1962, 23).

Fig. 04. Tandfield Gasworks (Bindman, Riemann. 1993, 155).

Strong brick pillars and chimneys breaking the horizontal cover line of facade, had a pretty relation with
both, the modulation of Bauakademie's red brick and the rotundity of the columns in the facade of the
Altes Museum grows through the entablature as akroterias. Philip Johnson, by copying Kahn's houses,
designs a house that was very successful. The Boissonnas (1956), the only one with sturdy pillars of red
brick, parameterizing the fragility white and transparent of the Johnson signature. Kahn's houses from 54
had oversized brick pillars exaggerating spatial rupture over the ground surface, questioning the Modern
Movement which reclaimed diaphanous or transparent spaces as their great achievement. These pillars
arranged in a double line appeared in Perspecta on a floor plan only of pillars which Kahn liked to
highlight. Each column unit generates its own space. Where space is the result of an intrinsic order of the
building, trying to integrate space and matter, solid and void. In search of a fullness, which was timeless.

The brick was one of Schinkel's great discoveries. Gasworks Tanfield Edinburgh caught his eye. The
central chimney marked the shaft like a giant obelisk and gas deposits were staying in what seemed like
Scottish medieval towers with some Palladian features. These same medieval towers would inspire Kahn
to project Richard's laboratories, with its brick surrounding it.

Fig. 05. Bricklaying detail(B, R 1993, 133). Fig. 06. Hebridean islands (B, R. 1993, 166).

Because of Schinkel's tremendous sensitivity towards nature, which he mentions almost every day in his
diary, we find an allusion to the landscape, its beauty, the danger of degradation and even protection in his
work. He puts special stress upon the location of the buildings. But the landscape could also be urban-
landscape, hence the concern that the size of the factories could exceed the Royal Palace in Berlin, and
that the towers of the churches might lose their proportionate scale. To Schinkel, art and nature go
together; so too with Kahn

From light to moderation

It is well known that Kahn had an interest in light. His buildings are designed to optimize the resources
offered by the natural light whether it be in Dhaka or Yale.
The light was another one of Schinkel discoveries on his trip to England. The need for light as a resource
not only in factories and workshops but also in museums, hospitals and private homes, made Schinkel
take note of constructive solutions favoring their entry to the rooms. In fact the only praise that makes the
work of Seane noteworthy is the way he designed overhead lighting.
Many of his sketches contain buildings that could be factories, market halls or churches that seek lateral
or zenithal light in countless ways. The light enters through the top of the building and reaches the ground
floor. To get it they open óculos, coffered, windows, and they put double covers, so that natural light
cascades to the lower floors. An innovative example is the design of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, by J.
Nash. Here in addition to overhead lighting and stained glass windows over stairwells, the English
architect designs a ladder that allows light to pass through it illuminating the ground floor. Schinkel draws
it carefully in his diary, in which the railing, treads and risers of wrought iron staircase and the bevels,
frames and brackets appears. He had discovered the translucent staircase.
The staircase of the Kahn's Esherick House reminds us, for its subtle wit, of the Nash's staircase designed
for the Brighton Royal Pavilion, due to the novel adopted solution so that light can get to it. Schinkel's
interest in Nash was for the more practical solutions rather than for the pomp and pageantry of his
architecture. The simplicity of the facade of the Bauakademie shows us the effort of the architect to save
superfluous things but giving the building anything else what he called elegance. The simple cube-shaped
building has a square courtyard where the natural light gets distributed to the interior rooms. Simple and
effective.

Fig. 07. Details of the Royal Pavilion stairway in Brighton by J. Nash (Bindman, Riemann. 1993, 166).

In buildings erected to impress the visitor, such as Eaton Hall in Chester, Schinkel saw that their careful
design lacked luster, highlighting their wonderful views. The luxury does not impress him. He seeks
simplicity and elegance, both in his work and in his personal life. He enjoys the company of his people
and his happiness comes from seeing his son Karl become an industrious young man (Bindman, Riemann
1993, 183). For Kahn ostentation, both in ones personal life and in ones own architecture was not
something that was within his field of vision.

English feedback

In 1992 the London galleries seem reluctant to collect the work of Kahn, which would restore it to its
place in the history of architecture. Paul Barker, in an article in The Guardian, regrets the reluctance of the
galleries to receive Kahn and suggests this could be because of their possible lack of attractiveness.
According to Barker, without Kahn's work there would not have been able the representative buildings
such as the Royal National Theatre in London (1967-1976) by Denys Lasdun, or the Lloyds building in
London (1978-1986) by Richard Rogers and Mike Davies.
Kahn brought to the limit, the sentiment of an architect by approaching its dark and deeper meaning.
“Every building should have... his own soul,” he told his students. Speaking of the Kimbell Art Museum
in Fort Worth, Texas, Barker refers to its recessed vaults, as belonging to a Romanesque temple-like; but,
actually they are alike than Bauakademie vaults, which are the same as those Schinkel drew again and
again in his travel journal and then projected in the Bauakademie of Berlin.

Fig. 08. Workshop buildings in Woolwich dockyards (Bindman, Riemann. 1993, 93).

The duplicity in the uses of hollow pillars, which had advanced Schinkel, drives Kahn to become a strong
advocate for the separation between servant spaces and served spaces, discovered for the bathhouse in
Trenton (1955) and then developed in the Richardson laboratories (1965) and subsequently adopted by
Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. But so we found it at the Barbican Center (1982) by Chamberlin,
Powell and Bon. But without Kahn hardly any of the obsessive effort geometric by British architect James
Stirling would exist.
The intent use of light found in the British Art Center at Yale, comes in sections very similar to those
found in the freehand drawings Schinkel made of English factories, or the section of the St John Market
by Foster, father and son, who finished off the cover with caissons to allow light to enter.
The art gallery of Yale University has a lot to do with Bauakademie. In their brick walls, blind molded
with horizontal bands, which also recognize the expansion of the National Gallery by Ventury, although
not the brickwork, keeps fine modulation lines sunken in facade.

Conclusion

Now, from the Westminster Reference Library, things look different. From the windows onto Orange
Street, Venturi winks at us from the National Gallery. In 1991, the outstanding disciple of Kahn, Robert
Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, designed the Sainsbury Wing extension of the museum in the heart of
London. Venturi followed in the footsteps of the master, who continued in the footsteps of Schinkel, and
thanks to the publication of a travelogue we know that in 1826 he traveled to England in the Industrial
Revolution, collecting architectural ideas and methods that would change his later work as an architect
and the work of everyone who came after him.
The publication of the newspaper has also enabled us to approach the humanization of architecture,
appreciating personal qualities which dignify the man as a human being and will allow him, as an
architect, to reach his peak in the focus of his work.
“Emotional training is necessary today. For whom? First of all for those who govern and administer the
people.”
In 1944 The Need for a New Monumentality by Sigfried Giedion, begins with this motto. The text was
edited by Paul Zucker, the same person who in 1951 published the article: The Paradox of Architectural
Theory at the Beginning of “Modern Movement”. The article ended by passing the baton to the 1950s
generation of architects: “It will be up to the architects of the second half of our century to express in their
creations those ideas which were the intrinsic problems of the theoreticians of the first few decades of our
century.”
Kahn picked up the baton, but didn't go directly to architectural theorists. He went directly to the source,
to the architecture. His approach, which he had acquired through Schinkel, turned architecture into a
discipline. He was committed to the radical changes in German architecture after Schinkel's tour of
England, where, as Vincent Scully would say, he tried to integrate space and matter, solid and void, as he
searched for a completely correct classical design. And surely he simultaneously and unknowlingly,
approaching the social, environmental and human problems of his time, gave a human soul to the inert
element and provided thus a timeless solution.

Referencias

BARKER, Paul. August 26 1992. Architecture: Hush now, even concrete has feelings Louis Kahn
searched for souls in buildings, The Independent. London http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/art/news/architecture-hush-now-even-concrete-has-feelings--louis-kahn-searched-for-souls-

BINDMAN, David. RIEMANN, Gottfried. 1993 “The English Journey”: Journal of a Visit to France
and Britain in 1826. Yale University Press. New Haven, London.

BROOKS, H. Allen. 1997. Le Corbusier's formative years: Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at La Chaux-de-

GIEDION, Sigfried. 1944. The Need for a New Monumentality. Philosophical Library. New York.

GRESLERI, Giuliano. 1984. Le Corbusier: Viaggio in Oriente. Marsilio.Venecia.

JUÁREZ, Antonio. 2006. El universo imaginario de Louis I. Kahn. Fundación Caja de Arquitectos.
Barcelona.

LE CORBUSIER. 1987. Le Voyage d’Orient. Electa, Milano.

M. MANSILLA, Luis. 2002. Apuntes de viaje al interior del tiempo. Fundación Caja de Arquitectos.
Barcelona. En GRESLERI, Giuliano. Le Corbusier, Il viaggio in Toscana.

SCULLY, Vincent Joseph. 1962. Louis I.. Kahn. G. Braziller, London, New York.

TWOMBLY Robert (editor). 2003. Louis Kahn, essential texts, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
London.
ZUCKER, Paul. 1951.The Paradox of Architectural Theories at the Beginning of the "Modern
Movement". Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 8-14. University of
California Press.