GREEK ARCHITECTURE

Greek Architecture in the 20th century

Greek Architecture in the 20th century

[Figure 1]

Year created: 1823

Title of artwork: The Altes Museum ("Old Museum"), Berlin

Architect's name(s): Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Medium: Architecture

“The Altes Museum” is one of numerous worldwide popular museums on Berlin's Museum Island in Germany. (www.monopol-magazin.com) A pervasive impulse toward "collecting and curiosity" not only informed these museum competition projects, it also actively expressed itself in the Kunst- und Wunderkammern, studioli, and cabinets that proliferated in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in Europe. As a further extension of such practices, paper projects of a different sort were also developed in eighteenth-century France. (Lee, 2006) Rather than starting from scratch (and with no real intention to build), these proposals had explored the possibility of converting existing palace structures into research centers that would be dedicated to scientific and artistic work.

By contrast, the dryness of Durand's design reflected his equally prosaic approach to the practice of architecture, an approach that has prompted many architectural historians to characterize this architect-theorist as the first "functionalist" of the nineteenth century. Despite Durand's rejection of architectural poetics in favor of professional pragmatics, however, his museum project still maintained the dramatic physical scale envisioned by Boullee. More significantly, it acknowledged its eighteenth-century roots by sustaining the major compositional elements that had been shared by all five entries (including his own) submitted for the Grand Prix de Rome, namely, a square enclosure surrounding a Greek cross with central rotunda. (Lee, 2006) If Durand's museum continued to utilize the compositional elements of these earlier competition projects, however, it also operated on profoundly different conceptual terms. The most obvious symptom of this shift can be recognized only as a conspicuous absence, whose impact depends on knowing what was left out. In Durand's design, for the first time, a museum project was not dedicated to the combined pursuits of letters, sciences, and arts. Rather, the legend to Durand's building plan identified only rooms dedicated to painting, sculpture, architecture, and annual exhibitions. His museum had become specifically a museum of art. (Lee, 2006)

What happened to the rest? As Durand explained, small cities might have just one museum to serve several purposes. In large cities with extensive collections, on the other hand, "there can be several museum [sic], some intended to contain the rarest works of Nature, others to hold masterpieces of the Arts." If there are too many things in one place, then divide them up: this sounds like a reasonable explanation. Still, one need only recall such familiar seventeenth-century examples as the Musaeum Kircherianum in Rome, assembled by the Egyptologist Athanasius Kircher, to realize that crowding--the perception of "too much"--was not a matter of material quantity. More was here than meets the eye. (Lee, 2006)

As teacher and pupil, Boullee and Durand were only a generation apart. But the years between 1783 and 1805 also represented a crucial period in the political history of France, and this is also commonly identified as the period that saw the origin of the modern museum ...