Architecture of Germany
The architecture of Germany has a long, rich and diverse history. Every major European style from
Centuries of fragmentation of Germany into
German urban culture is therefore not only urban but is also shaped by medium-sized cities, rural small towns and large villages. From an architectural point of view, it is a generally recognized fact that the main centers are not representative of the whole country.
The Brandenburg Gate,[5] Cologne Cathedral, St. Paul's Church (Frankfurt am Main), Neuschwanstein Castle, Hambach Castle, Wartburg and the Reichstag building are some of the most symbolic constructions of Germany.
Urnfield/Celtic architecture
By the late
The people who had adopted these cultural characteristics in central and southern Germany are regarded as
The Italic peoples, including the Latins, from which the Romans emerged, come from the Urnfield culture of central Europe. Later the Romans would return to Germany to erect buildings of the Roman architecture.[14][15][16]
Ancient Roman architecture
The
An important metropolis of that time was
With the departure of the Romans, their urban culture and advances in architecture (e.g., underfloor heating, glass windows) vanished from Germany.
Pre-Romanesque
The
One of the most important churches in this style is the
Romanesque
The
The cathedrals of
Gothic
Cologne Cathedral is after Milan Cathedral the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Construction began in 1248 and took, with interruptions, until 1880 to complete – a period of over 600 years. It is 144.5 metres long, 86.5 m wide and its two towers are 157 m tall.[17] Because of its enormous twin spires, it also has the largest façade of any church in the world. The choir of the cathedral, measured between the piers, also holds the distinction of having the largest height to width ratio of any Medieval church, 3.6:1, exceeding even Beauvais Cathedral which has a slightly higher vault.[18]
Brick Gothic (German: Backsteingotik) is a specific style of Gothic architecture common in Northern Europe, especially in Northern Germany and the regions around the Baltic Sea without natural rock resources. The buildings are built more or less using only bricks. Stralsund City Hall and St. Nicholas Church are good examples of this style. Cities such as Lübeck, Rostock, Wismar, Stralsund Greifswald and various towns such as Szczecin, Kołobrzeg, Gdańsk in present-day northern and western Poland, regions that had been German-settled since the Middle Ages, are shaped by this regional style. A model for many North German churches was St. Mary's in Lübeck, built between 1200 and 1350.
The building of Gothic churches was accompanied by the construction of the
The dwellings of this period were mainly
Renaissance
Some princes, however, promoted modern art, for example in Torgau, Aschaffenburg, and Landshut, where the Renaissance era originated. Examples include the decorated inner courtyard of Trausnitz Castle and the ducal Landshut Residence in the inner city, built by Italian Renaissance master craftsmen.
The
In the area of the Weser there are numerous castles and manor houses in Weser Renaissance style. In Wolfenbüttel, the castle of the Guelphs and the Evangelical town church Beatae-Maria-Virginis are worth mentioning as special examples of the Renaissance. In Thuringia and Saxony, many churches and palaces in the Renaissance style were built, for example, William Castle with castle in Schmalkalden, the church of Rudolstadt, the Castle of Gotha, the Old Town Hall in Leipzig, the interior of the presbytery, the Freiberg Cathedral, the Castle in Dresden or the Schönhof in Gorlitz. In northern Germany there is Güstrower Castle and the rich interior of Stralsund's Nikolai Church.
Baroque
The Baroque style arrived in Germany after the
The interaction of architecture, painting and sculpture is an essential feature of Baroque architecture. An important example is the
Other well-known Baroque palaces are the New Palace in
The most well-known examples of Bavarian Baroque include the Benedictine abbey in Ottobeuren, the Weltenburg and the Ettal Abbey, and the Asam Church in Munich.
Other examples of Baroque church architecture are the
Classicism
Classicism arrived in Germany in the second half of the 18th century. It drew inspiration from the classical architecture of antiquity and was a reaction against the Baroque style, in both architecture and landscape design.
The Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm is one of the first and largest English parks in Germany. It was created in the late 18th century under the regency of Duke Leopold III of Anhalt-Dessau (1740–1817), after returning from a Grand Tour to Italy, the Netherlands, England, France and Switzerland which he had taken together with his architect friend Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff. Unlike the formal Baroque gardens, it celebrated the naturalistic manner of the English landscape garden and symbolised the promised freedom of the Enlightenment era.
The
The most important architect of this style in Germany was undoubtedly Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Schinkel's style, in his most productive period, is defined by its appeal to Greek rather than Roman architecture, avoiding the style that was linked to the recent French occupiers. His most famous buildings are found in and around Berlin. These include Neue Wache (1816–1818), the Schauspielhaus (1819–1821) at the Gendarmenmarkt, which replaced the earlier theatre that was destroyed by fire in 1817, and the Altes Museum (old museum, see photo) on Museum Island (1823–1830).
Near
Another important building of the period is Wilhelm Castle in Kassel (begun 1786).
Historicism
Historicism, sometimes known as eclecticism, is an architectural style that draws inspiration from historic styles or craftsmanship. After the neoclassical period (which could itself be considered a historicist movement), a new historicist phase emerged in the middle of the 19th century, marked by a return to a more ancient classicism, in particular in architecture and in the genre of history painting.
An important architect of this period was
There were regional variants of the historicist styles in Germany. Examples are the
The predilection for medieval buildings has its most famous exemplar in the
There is also, at the end of the period, the Reichstag building (1894) by Paul Wallot.
Art Nouveau (Jugendstil)
German
Drawing from traditional German
Modern
The distinctive character of
The initial impetus for modernist architecture in Germany was mainly industrial construction, in which the architectural design was not subjected to so much to the prevailing historicism, for example the
The so-called "classical modernism" in Germany is essentially identical to the Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, shortly after he had succeeded Henry van de Velde in Weimar as Director of the Arts and Crafts School. The Bauhaus became the most influential art and architecture school of the 20th century. Although at first it had no architecture department, Gropius saw in architecture the "ultimate goal of all artistic activity."
The Einstein Tower (German: Einsteinturm) is an astrophysical observatory in the Albert Einstein Science Park in Potsdam, designed by architect Erich Mendelsohn. This was one of Mendelsohn's first major projects, completed when a young Richard Neutra was on his staff, and his best-known building. At a time of inflation and economic hardship, the Bauhaus sought a cost-effective, functional and modern design for housing. Thus in Weimar in 1923 there arose the Haus am Horn of Georg Muche and Adolf Meyer. In 1925, a year after the nationalist parties gained a majority in the Thuringian state parliament, the Bauhaus in Weimar was shut down. That same year, in Dessau, Gropius began to build a new school, completed in 1926. The Bauhaus Dessau is by far the most famous monument of classical modern art in Germany.
When the Nazis gained power in 1932, the Bauhaus shut down. After this there was a
A number of housing estates built in this period are now among the most important buildings of the modernist period. They include the
.Between 1926 and 1940 most radio towers in Germany were built of wood, of which the tallest was that of
National Socialism
The Nazi architecture (1933–1945) with main architect Albert Speer served propaganda purposes.[citation needed]
Post-war reconstruction
During the Allied strategic bombing campaign of World War II, the historic city centres of most cities suffered severe losses to architectural heritage, with significant cases of almost total annihilation.
The fiercely discussed reconstruction efforts after the war varied considerably between East and West Germany, and between individual cities. In most cities some of the more significant landmarks were restored or reconstructed, often in a simplified manner. In general, the cities were not reconstructed according to their historic appearance, but in a functional, modernist style, with often a greater emphasis on desperately needed housing, than historic structures.
There is a recent trend in the 21st century in many German cities to resume reconstruction work and
See also
- German Architecture Museum
- German-Chilean architecture
- Association of German Architects
- List of German architects
- List of architecture schools in Germany
- Architecture of Berlin
- Architecture of Munich
Notes
- ^ "Shared Docs Downloads" (PDF). www.zensus2011.de.
- ^ "Roncardor Tilman von" (PDF). edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de.
- ^ "Inszenierte Schwerstarbeit: Mythos Trümmerfrauen". 8 August 2022.
- ^ "Alt- oder Neubau? So wohnt Berlin".
- ^ Elling, Elmar (29 December 2005). "Nationale Symbole | bpb". bpb.de (in German). Retrieved 2022-01-06.
- PMID 29466337.
- ^ "Heuneburg – Celtic city of Pyrene".
- ^ "Heuneburg (Herbertingen-Hundersingen)". Landeskunde Online. Retrieved April 17, 2020.
- ^ Herodotus (1857). Herodoti Musae. in bibliopolio Hahniano.
- ^ Herodotus (1829). Herodoti historiarum libri IX. G. Fr. Meyer. pp. 110–.
- ISBN 978-3-1116-6814-7.
- ISBN 978-0-3064-7257-2.
- ISBN 978-0-4151-5090-3.
- S2CID 234471370.
- from the original on 27 October 2023. Retrieved 12 January 2022.
- ^ Saupe et al. 2021 "The results suggest that the Steppe-related ancestry component could have first arrived through Late N/Bell Beaker groups from Central Europe."
- ^ "Cologne Cathedral official website". Archived from the original on 2016-06-13. Retrieved 2009-10-18.
- ^ Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method
- ^ https://www.quedlinburg.de/Familie-und-Leben/Kultur/St%C3%A4dtische-Museen/Fachwerkmuseum-im-St%C3%A4nderbau/
- ^ https://phototravellers.de/deutschland-schoenste-fachwerkstaedte/
- ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung (2010-05-17). "Einkaufsbummel in historischen Höfen" (in German). Retrieved 2023-09-07.
- ISBN 978-0-19-960297-1. Archived(PDF) from the original on 9 October 2022. Retrieved 7 August 2022.
- ^ "Das Brandenburger Tor" [The Brandenburg Gate] (in German). Die Stiftung Denkmalschutz Berlin. Archived from the original on 2011-07-19. Retrieved 2011-05-14.
- ^ "Anfänge (in German)". Semperoper. Archived from the original on June 5, 2009. Retrieved 9 August 2009.
- ^ "Das Kleine Hoftheater (in German)". Semperoper. Archived from the original on November 10, 2007. Retrieved 9 August 2009.
- ^ "Art Nouveau - Art Nouveau Art". Huntfor.com. Archived from the original on 2013-02-22. Retrieved 2013-03-25.