The architecture of Germany has a long, rich and diverse history. It is characterized by a high degree of regional diversity, caused by centuries of fragmentation of Germany into principalities and kingdoms. This made for a heterogeneous and diverse architectural style, with architectural differences even from town to town. This makes Germany today a rich historical heritage site.
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The Roman Empire once extended over much of today's German Federal Republic, and there are still remains from around 100-150AD at the Limes Romanus, the border defence system of Ancient Rome marking the boundaries of the Roman Empire at that time. In addition to military structures such as forts and military camps built by the Romans, and other border fortifications, there are also spas, bridges, and amphitheatres.
Trier, on the banks of the Moselle River, is the oldest city in Germany, a great metropolis founded in or before 16 BC. The best-known survival from that period is probably the Porta Nigra, the best-preserved ancient city gate. There are also remains of thermal spas, a Roman bridge and the (reconstructed) Constantine basilica.
With the departure of the Romans, their urban culture and their advances in architecture (e.g., heating, window, and glass) vanished from Germany.
The Pre-Romanesque period in Western European art is usually dated from either the emergence of the Merovingian kingdom in about 500 or from the Carolingian Renaissance in the late 8th century, to the beginning of the 11th century Romanesque period. German buildings from this period include Lorsch Abbey. This combines elements of the Roman triumphal arch (arch-shaped passageways, half-columns) with the vernacular Teutonic heritage (baseless triangles of the blind arcade, polychromatic masonry).
One of the most important churches in this style is the Abbey Church of St. Michael's, constructed between 1001 and 1031 under the direction of Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim (993-1022) as the chapel of his Benedictine monastery. It is built in the so-called Ottonic (Early-Romanesque) style. The Ottonian Renaissance was a minor renaissance that accompanied the reigns of the first three emperors of the Saxon Dynasty, all named Otto: Otto I (936–973), Otto II (973–983), and Otto III (983–1002).
The Romanesque period is characterised by semi-circular arches, which evolved into the Gothic style of pointed arches, beginning in the 12th century. The most significant building of this period in Germany is probably Speyer Cathedral at Speyer. It was built in stages from about 1030, and was in the 11th century the largest building in the Christian world and an architectural symbol of the power of the Salian dynasty, a dynasty of four German Kings (1024–1125).
The cathedrals of Worms and Mainz are other important examples of Romanesque style. Many churches and monasteries were founded in this era, particularly in Saxony-Anhalt. The Rhenish Romanesque, for example at Limburg Cathedral, produced works that used coloured surrounds. Of particular importance are also the church of St. Servatius in Quedlinburg, and also Luebeck Cathedral, Brunswick Cathedral, Trier Cathedral and Bamberg Cathedral, whose last phase of construction falls in the Gothic period.
Maulbronn Abbey is considered a significant example of Cistercian architecture. It was built between the 12th and 15 Century, and therefore includes Gothic elements. In the 11th Century there also began construction of numerous castles, including the famous castle of Wartburg, which was later expanded in the Gothic style.
Gothic architecture flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture. The first Gothic buildings in Germany were built from about 1230, for example the Liebfrauenkirche (German for Church of Our Lady) ca. 1233-1283 in Trier, which is one of the most important early Gothic cathedrals in Germany and falls into the architectural tradition of the French Gothic.
Freiburg Cathedral was built in three stages, the first beginning in 1120 under the dukes of Zähringen, the second beginning in 1210, and the third in 1230. Of the original building, only the foundations still exist. It is noted for its 116-metre tower, which Jacob Burckhardt reputedly claimed is the most beautiful in Christian architecture. The tower is nearly square at the base, and at its centre is the dodecagonal star gallery. Above this gallery, the tower is octagonal and tapered, with the spire above. It is the only Gothic church tower in Germany that was completed in the Middle Ages (1330), and survived the bombing raids of November 1944, which destroyed all of the houses on the west and north side of the market.
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.[1] 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.[2]
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 and Greifswald 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 guild houses and the construction of town halls by the rising bourgeoisie. A good example is the Gothic Town Hall (13th century) at Stralsund. There is also Bremen Town Hall (1410) and the (reconstructed) city hall of Munster (originally from 1350).
The dwellings of this period were mainly timber-framed buildings, as can still be seen in Goslar and Quedlinburg. Quedlinburg has one of the oldest half-timbered houses in Germany.
Renaissance architecture belongs to the period between the early 15th and early 17th centuries in different parts of Europe, when there was a conscious revival and development of certain elements of ancient Greek and Roman thought and culture. The earliest example of Renaissance architecture in Germany is the Fugger chapel in St. Anne's Church, Augsburg. At that time, Germany was fragmented into numerous principalities, the citizens generally had few rights and armed conflict, especially the religious conflicts of the Protestant Reformation, ensured that large tracts of land remained virtually undeveloped.
Some princes, however, promoted modern art, for example in Torgau and 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.
St. Michael in Munich (begun around 1581) is an important Renaissance building. There is also Heidelberg Castle with its typical Renaissance façades. Augsburg City Hall is also a significant renaissance, but it was late, built from 1614 to 1620, by the Augsburg architect Elias Holl.
In the area of the Weser there are numerous castles and manor houses in the style of the Weser Renaissance. There are also the cities of Lemgo and Hamelin. Wolfenbüttel Castle of Guelph and the evangelical church Beatae Maria Virginis are also special examples of the Renaissance style.
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, a 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 architecture began in the early 17th century in Italy, reinventing the humanist Roman vocabulary of Renaissance architecture in a new rhetorical, theatrical, sculptural fashion, expressing the triumph of absolutist church and state. But whereas the Renaissance drew on the wealth and power of the Italian courts, and was a blend of secular and religious forces, the Baroque directly linked to the Counter-Reformation, a movement within the Catholic Church to reform itself in response to the Protestant Reformation.
The Baroque style arrived in Germany after the Thirty Years War. The Baroque architecture of the German government royal and princely houses was based on the model of France, especially the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. Examples are the Zwinger Palace in Dresden built by Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann from 1709 to 1728, initially for the holding of court festivals. The architecture of absolutism always put the ruler at the center, thus increasing the spatial composition, for example, the power of the ruler - perhaps in the form of the magnificent staircase leading to the person of the ruler.
The interaction of architecture, painting and sculpture is an essential feature of Baroque architecture. An important example is the Würzburg Residence with the Emperor's Hall and the staircase, whose construction began under the leadership of Johann Balthasar Neumann, in 1720. The frescoes in the staircase were made by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo from 1751 to 1753.
Other well-known Baroque palaces are the New Palace in Potsdam, Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin, Schloss Weißenstein in Pommersfelden and Augustusburg Castle in Brühl, whose interiors are partly in the Rococo style.
Rococo is the late phase of the Baroque, in which the decoration became even more abundant and showed most colors in even brighter tones. For example, Sanssouci Palace, built from 1745 to 1747, which was the former summer palace of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, in Potsdam, near Berlin. It is often counted among the German rivals of Versailles.
Among the best known examples include the Bavarian Baroque church in the Benedictine Ottobeuren, the Weltenburg monastery, Ettal Abbey and St. John Nepomuk Church, called Asam Church in Munich. Other examples of Baroque church architecture are the Basilica of the Vierzehnheiligen in Upper Franconia and the rebuilt Frauenkirche in Dresden, created by George Bähr between 1722 and 1743.
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 English Grounds of Wörlitz 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 Brandenburg Gate, commissioned by King Frederick William II of Prussia as a sign of peace and completed by Carl Gotthard Langhans in 1791, is arguably one of the most famous monuments of classicism in Germany. The Brandenburg Gate was restored from 2000 to 2002 by the Stiftung Denkmalschutz Berlin (Berlin Monument Conservation Foundation).[3] It is now considered one of Europe's most famous landmarks.
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 Imperial 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 theater that was destroyed by fire in 1817, and the Altes Museum (old museum, see photo) on Museum Island (1823–1830).
Leo von Klenze (1784–1864) was a court architect of Bavarian King Ludwig I, another prominent representative of the Greek revival style. Ludwig's passion for Hellenism inspired the architectural style of von Klenze, who built many neoclassical buildings in Munich, including the Ruhmeshalle and Monopteros temple. On Königsplatz he designed probably the best known modern Hellenistic architectural ensemble. Near Regensburg he built the Walhalla temple, named after Valhalla, the home of the gods in Norse mythology.
Another important building of the period is Wilhelm Castle in Kassel (begun 1786).
Historicism (historismus), sometimes known as eclecticism, is an artistic and architectural style that draws inspiration from historic styles or craftmanship. After the neo-classicist 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 Gottfried Semper, who built the gallery (1855) at the Zwinger Palace and the Semper Opera (1878) in Dresden. The building has features derived from the Early Renaissance style, Baroque and even features Corinthian style pillars typical of classical Greece (classical revival).[4][5]
There were regional variants of this style. Examples are the resort architecture (especially on the German Baltic coast), the Hanover School of Architecture and the Nuremberg style.
The predilection for medieval buildings has its most famous exemplar in the castle of Neuschwanstein, which Ludwig II commissioned in 1869. Neuschwanstein was designed by Christian Jank, a theatrical set designer, which possibly explains the fantastical nature of the resulting building. The architectural expertise, vital to a building in such a perilous site, was provided first by the Munich court architect Eduard Riedel and later by Georg Dollmann, son-in-law of Leo von Klenze.
There is also Ulm Cathedral, and at the end of the period the Reichstag building (1894) by Paul Wallot.
The Art Nouveau style is commonly known by its German name, Jugendstil. Drawing from traditional German printmaking, the style uses precise and hard edges, an element that was rather different from the naturalistic style of the time. The movement was centered in Hamburg and was an essential element of the German movement. Within the field of Jugendstil art, there is a variety of different methods, applied by the various individual artists. Methods range from classic to romantic. One feature that sets Jugendstil apart is the typography used, whose letter and image combination is unmistakable. The combination was used for covers of novels, advertisements, and exhibition posters. Designers often used unique display typefaces that worked harmoniously with the image.
Henry Van de Velde, who worked most of his career in Germany, was a Belgian theorist who influenced many others to continue in this style of graphic art including Peter Behrens, Hermann Obrist, and Richard Riemerschmid. August Endell is another notable Art Nouveau designer.[7]
Magazines were important in spreading the visual idiom of Jugendstil, especially the graphical qualities. Besides Jugend, other important ones were the satirical Simplicissimus and Pan.
The distinctive character of modern architecture is the elimination of unnecessary ornament from a building and faithfulness to its structure and function. The style is commonly summed up in four slogans: ornament is a crime, truth to materials, form follows function, and Le Corbusier's description of houses as "machines for living". It developed early in the 20th century. It was adopted by many influential architects and architectural educators. Although few "Modern buildings" were built in the first half of the century, after the Second World War it became the dominant architectural style for institutional and corporate buildings for three decades.
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 AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin by Peter Behrens (1908–1909) and especially the Fagus Factory by Walter Gropius in Alfeld an der Leine (1911–1914). During this period (1915) there occurred the construction of the first skyscraper in Jena.
The so-called classical modernism in Germany is essentially identical to the Bauhaus, founded by 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 development. Although at first it had no architecture department, Gropius saw in the 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, Germany 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.
The Nazis made life difficult for the Bauhaus, which tried to keep out of politics as far as possible, but when the Nazis gained power in 1932, they had to shut down. After this there was a diaspora of masters and students of the Bauhaus across the world, especially in the United States, and the Bauhaus style spread through the world, becoming known as the International Style. In 1927, one of the first and most defining manifestations of the International Style was the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, built as a component of the exhibition "Die Wohnung," organized by the Deutscher Werkbund, and overseen by Mies van der Rohe. The fifteen contributing architects included Mies, and other names most associated with the movement: Peter Behrens, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, J.J.P. Oud, Mart Stam, and Bruno Taut. The exhibition was enormously popular, with thousands of daily visitors.
The Horseshoe housing estate built in Berlin in 1930 by Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner during the Weimar Republic was an important work. A number of housing estates built in this period, particularly in Berlin, are now among the most important buildings of the modernist period, including large settlement of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1931) by Bruno Taut, Martin Wagner, Hugo Haering, Otto Salvisberg and Alfred Grenander, Siemens and the City (1930) by Hans Scharoun, Walter Gropius, Hugo Haering, Otto Banning, Fred Forbart and Paul Henning.
There was also the Allotment Dammerstock (1930) in Karlsruhe by Gropius, as well as the Zeche Zollverein in Essen, built from 1927 to 1932 by Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer.