GERMAN TECTONICS

11 Mitchell Schwarzer

Since Greek antiquity, architecture has struggled with its exclusion from the
esteemed ranks of the liberal arts. Because of the building art’s preoccupation with
necessity – structure, and function – writers from Roman times to the Enlighten-
ment consigned it to the mechanical arts. The liberal arts employed words,
numbers, and spatial relationships – the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic,
and the quadrivium of mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy – to found
statements of knowledge on the reality of things and examples on moral bearing
and conduct. By contrast, the mechanical arts, which also included weaving, agri-
culture, blacksmithing, and cooking, sought to transform raw materials into fin-
ished works that, nonetheless, would always be burdened by their predominant
materiality. To alleviate this inferior status, architecture turned to mathematics,
geometry, and rhetoric for inspiration. Within a long tradition of architectural trea-
tises, the building’s ornamental shell became a predominant focus, the discipline’s
way of expressing and elevating its underlying structural and functional necessity.
As we shall see, the German tectonic discourse emerging at the turn of the nine-
teenth century did not fundamentally alter this equation – the requirement that
ornament both express and elevate structure and function. What had changed
by 1800 was the expanded field attributable to the famous triad of Stärke (structural
strength), Bequemlichkeit (convenience), and Schönheit (beauty), as well as the
epistemological methods – based less on mathematics or rhetoric and more on
aesthetic perception and historical development – welding these categories
together.
The discourse on ruins emerging during the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury illustrates well how the new turn to aesthetics and history profoundly chan-
ged how architecture was evaluated. In the Renaissance and baroque age, ruins
had been considered remnants of classical society, exemplars of its values, and,
occasionally, exceptions or expansions to its rules. Around 1750, the French abbé
Marc-Antoine Laugier, famous for having written one of the key founding texts
of neoclassicism, displayed a growing estimation for primitive building form.

The Companions to the History of Architecture, Volume III, Nineteenth-Century Architecture.

Edited by Martin Bressani and Christina Contandriopoulos.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

Free from the baroque or rococo extravagances of decadent, civilized Europe,

primitive buildings had a purity and expressive strength that could be used as
a model to reform architecture. Brandishing his primitive hut, Laugier sought
to combat both late-baroque excess and regulate the ever-growing field of
archaeological evidence from primitive cultures. Supposedly the primordial
exemplar of architecture’s borrowing of constructive principles from nature,
Laugier envisioned his ruin/prototype as setting the stage for a renewed classical
tradition, putting an end to investigations into other, more intriguing primitive
architectures.
Any such hope was in vain, especially in Germany, where Goethe, as early as
1772, had made a great apology for the primitive, criticizing, in passing, Laugier’s
fake primitive hut. In subsequent decades, with the rise of German Romanticism,
the obsession with ruins only grew, encompassing writers such as Georg Foster,
Novalis, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck. Their essays,
poems, and travel diaries pointed away from a singular or universal model. Influ-
enced by aesthetics, primitive forms provided manifolds of experience and not
objective models – routes into tantalizingly diverse and mysterious epochs and
equally rapturous sensual immersion. Often obscured by plant overgrowth, geo-
logical sediment, and later additions, ruins allowed a journey into older civilizations
and, following that, reflections into the potential reinvigoration of the current age.
Inasmuch as ruins largely consisted of the constructional core of buildings, lacking
their original ornamental encasement, the new appreciation of ruins encouraged
the idea that architecture’s mechanical/utilitarian underpinnings could be con-
nected with its artistic role.
At the outset of the nineteenth century, romanticism and the concomitant
attraction toward the Middle Ages still remained at the periphery of German
architectural thought. Alois Hirt’s Architecture According to the Principles of the
Ancients, published in 1809, once again called for a return to classical order.
“Correct column proportions are the product,” he claimed, “of multiple examples
that take hold of the essence of architecture.”1 Yet by the early 1820s, in a debate
with Heinrich Hübsch, an advocate of medieval architecture, new ideological tra-
jectories were being promoted. Hirt’s advocacy for classicism dug into the Vitru-
vian legacy.2 The stone triglyphs, dentils, and column capitals of the Greek
temple, he claimed, copied and built upon the Greeks’ earlier manner of wooden
construction. Ornament was a language developed over time in wood and then
transferred to stone in order to dignify that constructive system. Hübsch, by con-
trast, pointed out that mechanical actions lie at the heart of architecture, and
must encompass not just construction, but ornament as well. The ornament
of Greek columns related to Greece’s particular culture, spirituality, environ-
ment, and materials. Disavowing the theory of stone imitation of wood, Hübsch
sought out ornamental forms that directly emerged from the mechanical
forces of construction – a quest that explains his new appreciation of medieval
architecture.3
 German Tectonics 3

Greco-Medieval Tectonics

Across the German world, both Greek and medieval styles had found architectural
champions. Between 1788 and 1791, the famous Brandenburg Gate by Carl Got-
thard Langhans rose at the edge of Berlin, a gateway to the city composed of Doric
columns and potent references to the ancient Propylaea of the Acropolis in Athens.
Other monumental works in the Greek style followed, among them Leo von
Klenze’s Walhalla Temple near Regensburg in Bavaria, conceived in 1807 and com-
pleted in 1842. Medieval architecture, for its part, received its due most notably by
the project, inaugurated during the Napoleonic Wars, to complete the great Gothic
cathedral of Cologne, and realized only half a century later in 1880. Hübsch’s In
Which Style Should We Build? (1828) promoted the round-arched Romanesque style,
a manner of building common throughout Germany before the Gothic phase. He
demonstrated its modern applicability in buildings such as the Karlsruhe Polytech-
nic, constructed between 1833 and 1835.
Eventually, German architects and theorists sought to develop a synthesis
between Greek formal purity and medieval variety and dynamism. The new dis-
cipline of art history, developed from the 1820s through the 1850s, found its core
mission in the reconciliation between these two poles of architectural creativity. It
could be argued that modern German (and to some extent European) identity was
indeed forged through a dialectical synthesis between pagan antiquity and Euro-
pean Christianity. As they developed between the 1830s and 1860s, tectonic the-
ories in architecture were a way of unifying these very different artistic and
cultural legacies under an aesthetic of dialectical transformation – a privileging
of the observer’s ability to apprehend, via separate artistic signs, the purposive
advances of material construction and derive aesthetic pleasure.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, like Goethe before him, spent most of his career veer-
ing between Greek classicism and the medieval, designing buildings in each style
and, in his unfinished Architectonic Manual (Architektonisches Lehrbuch), developing
the idea that past historical styles could be a means toward an artistic encapsu-
lation of changing mechanical and technological building solutions. To Schinkel,
as much as his predecessors, it was human needs that summoned a knowledge of
static laws and the essence of nature. But he demanded that ornament make these
laws visible to the viewer: the beholder must feel the essence of construction.4
Yet unlike Hübsch, who advocated a unified utilitarian/artistic design, Schinkel
did not believe that the language of construction and that of expression had to
be one and the same. The ornamental veil may have little to do with the real
technical means of construction but they must communicate, at the level of aes-
thetic sensations, their historical meanings and the dynamics of their material
behavior.
It is perhaps to Schinkel that we owe the conceptual division between forms of
construction and forms of art: forms derived from need and construction and those
derived from a historical language. What Schinkel called Grundformen meant
4 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

essentially that a system of ornament drawn from history was to represent the con-
structional realities of another age – the present. By embodying those new static
forces, the Grundformen create a new objective and representational order for archi-
tecture.5 By changing the appearance of a building, its proportions, its weight, its
surface rhythms, décor comments on its underlying structure. Ornament bridges,
the workings of constructive phenomena and those of the human perceptual facul-
ties and mind. To this extent, Schinkel reframed philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph von Schelling’s earlier argument that architecture should portray, symbol-
ize, or somehow express its own purpose and means of construction: the key to a
building’s beauty was its expression of utilitarian forces.6 Aesthetic judgment could
indeed proceed out of architectural praxis.
During the 1840s, the archaeologist and architect Karl Bötticher, Schinkel’s
pupil, extended the latter’s ideas on Grundformen into a more precise theory of tec-
tonics.7 Bötticher agreed with Schinkel that architecture must have at its disposal a
precise and exacting ornamental language to symbolize underlying actions and
forces. He likewise aimed to transcend Germany’s polarizing debate between
the Greek and medieval method. His solution was to utilize the ornamental system
of the Greek temple to represent the constructional actions of the present age –
principally stone and masonry vaulting conceived as an outgrowth of medieval
constructive experiments. Inspired by Kantian aesthetics, Bötticher’s tectonics
sought to resolve architectural Mannigfaltigkeit (the variety and complexity of
mechanical forces in a building) into an Einheit (unity) through the methods of
the liberal arts. Ornament, or architectural art, must refer to purpose and construc-
tion and, additionally, merge the act of perception into an aesthetic engagement
with nature and architecture’s mechanical forces.
In “The Development of the Forms of Greek Tectonics” (1840) and the Tectonics
of the Greeks (1844, 1852), Bötticher set forth his theory of architecture proceeding
from utility to representation. Architecture begins with the plan, expressing
through its set of divisions, rooms, doors, and corridors current programmatic
needs. The plan fixes horizontal dimensions on the ground and thus the spans
for the roofing system. Next comes a building’s vertical dimension, determining
the walls and/or point supports that carry the load of the roof and transmit its
forces safely to the ground. The structural framework thus emerges from program-
matic, spatial goals. Together, these actions constitute architecture’s first phase,
and Bötticher defined the building elements associated with them as Werkformen,
or the utilitarian/mechanical forms.
Because building programs continually transform with societal changes, and
because structural systems, likewise, are subject to continual modifications
and improvements, Bötticher called for a second, representational phase to design.
The building’s Werkformen would not be easily grasped by its public, nor could they
be evaluated as a suitable representative of architecture’s status as a liberal art.
Therefore, and more systematically than Schinkel, he advocated the careful elab-
oration of a Kunstformen, or a representational ornamental layer. If the Werkform
 German Tectonics 5

embodies pure materiality, or the functional and material arrangement responding

to static forces, the Kunstform stands for a purely expressive layer added over the
material reality of the building but that nonetheless leads us to comprehend the
higher meaning of its static relations.8 As Bötticher described it: “Because the Kunst-
form shapes the pure allegorically explained elements of each building member, it is
perfectly independent from the accidental type, properties and color of the material
substrate.”9
In an effort to meld Greek with medieval, the classical tradition with contem-
porary building demands, Bötticher adopted the Greek vocabulary of ornaments
as his language of Kunstformen. Looking at the columnar shaft and capital and
other ornaments related to mechanical forces, he saw in Greek design the most
perfect expression of building signs that pointed to underlying building members
engaged with those forces: elements of load bearing, dimensional junctures, and
static conflicts. A columnar base, for instance, expressed the compressive force
exerted upon a column. The curvature of the echinus showed the extent of
weight supported by the column: a more vertical slant for less weight and a hor-
izontal stance for a heavier entablature. The cyma molding, through its rhythm of
convex and concave curvatures, exhibited artistically the alternating rhythm of
load and support. Greek ornaments were able to express every nuance of struc-
ture – no matter if it emerged at a later date in history and within a profoundly
different culture.
Like Hirt and earlier classicist theorists, Bötticher separated construction from
art. Yet, in distinction to earlier theorists, the division between program/structure
and art/representation was reunified in aesthetic perception. Utility and beauty,
the bases for the mechanical and liberal arts, were first taken apart, and then
brought together and synthetically elevated: observer cemented with architectural
work; individual with social community; past with present.

Iron Tectonics

If at first Bötticher understood the modern age’s structural actions as an outgrowth

of medieval methods and materials, he soon recast his tectonic theory by integrating
iron. When it came to the development of iron (and later steel and reinforced con-
crete), Germany initially lagged behind Great Britain and France – though not by
far. As early as 1794–96, only a few decades after British engineer Abraham Darby
had built his daring iron bridge over the Severn at Coalbrookdale, a similar 60-foot
cast iron bridge consisting of five parallel ribs was cast over the Striegauer Wasser
near Laasan in Lower Silesia – the first iron bridge on the Continent. In 1816, land-
scape designer Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell erected an iron glasshouse at the Nym-
phenburg Palace outside Munich for the growing of foreign ornamental plants.
Although there are no early German examples of ferrovitreous shopping arcades,
as in Paris, or rail sheds, as in Bristol, by the middle of the nineteenth century
6 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

engineers throughout the German territories were utilizing cast (and wrought) iron
for the construction of palm houses, market buildings, and railway stations.
Engineers were receptive to iron, given its astounding structural properties:
reduction of structural mass; facility for carrying far greater loads and therefore
ability to span vast dimensions. Polytechnic schools built in Vienna (1815), Stuttgart
(1820), Karlsruhe (1825), and Munich (1827), became centers for advancing iron
technology. Texts, such as the mechanical engineer Ferdinand Redtenbacher’s Prin-
ciples of Mechanics (1852) and civil engineer Richard Baumeister’s Architectural Prin-
ciples of Form for Engineers (1866), guided the growing field.
Architects, accustomed to designing edifices faced in granite, sandstone, lime-
stone, and marble, were much slower to adapt to the new material. Iron radically
altered architecture’s texture and proportions, substituting thin supports for the
weight-bearing masonry that had characterized the discipline for millennia. Iron
was thus used by architects, but it was customarily hidden beneath layers of stone,
masonry, or plaster.
Only a few edifices left their iron members visible in the first half of the cen-
tury. Between 1817 and 1821, Schinkel used cast iron for the 20-meter-high Natio-
naldenkmal in Kreuzberg, a monument to the Wars of Liberation. In 1828, Georg
Moller erected a wrought iron dome over the eastern crossing of Mainz Cathe-
dral, and, in 1859–66, Eduard Knoblauch erected an audacious cast iron dome
(with visible cast iron columns) for the Neue Synagoge in Berlin. By the
1860s, a number of German architectural theorists had integrated the question
of iron construction within their debates, among them Richard Lucae, Carl
Schwatlo, and Ludwig Bohnstedt. Generally, they advocated the use of iron as
an interior secondary support for stone bearing walls or façades – acknowledging
its ability to increase building heights and spans. Resistance to the use of iron as a
Fullmaterial, or principal external expression, however, did not decrease until the
twentieth century.
In this context, Bötticher’s early advocacy for iron, his proposal to express its
mechanical actions through a stone Kunstform related to traditional architecture,
stands out as an original solution. In “On the Principle of Greek and German Build-
ing Ways” (1846), written only a few years after he had first articulated his tectonic
theory, he reiterated his belief that building styles followed not ornamental trends,
but underlying mechanics: “a new principal of static actions that emerged from the
material.”10 The struggle with material precedes any recourse to ornamental ele-
ments. Thus, architecture’s evolution should not be construed on the basis of orna-
mental succession, but more logically, on the shifting demands exerted by new
programs on the roofing system and, consequently, the building materials and
mechanical actions.
Looking at history, Bötticher discerned three great roofing (or constructional
systems): the relative (the posts and beams of the Greek style); the reactive (the
more widely-spaced arches and vaults of what he termed the Germanic (Gothic)
style); and the absolute (modern iron style).11 He then argued that modern German
 German Tectonics 7

architecture should neither go back to the pure Greek system of trabeation, given
its limitations for spanning spaces, nor continue merely within the Germanic style
of arcuation, plagued as he saw it for centuries by too many inappropriate, misun-
derstood classical ornaments. The modern static system would be developed out
of iron.
Iron’s absoluten Festigkeit, the dialectical synthesis of relative and reactive forces,
represented to him the logical outgrowth of the two earlier static systems. Struc-
ture would be adapted from medieval Germanic building traditions, piers and
vaults translated from stone to iron. Ornament, as he had already recommended,
would come from Greece. Its representational building language had already
proven to convey best the perceptual spirit of mechanical actions. Bötticher argued
for the predominant role of iron within the first phase of design, given its absolute
strength and ability to expand the parameters of a plan, yet recommended, in the
second design phase, that it be clad with stone, explanatory elements of Greek art
and design. His theory of iron tectonics was a compromise between tradition and
progress, older materials and newer ones, as well as a merger of architecture’s two
venerable constructional systems. Stone would veil iron, giving it a sense of mass so
as to suggest stability and security. But the ornamental detail would nonetheless
convey iron’s radical implications to the public. Greek decorative forms, as the dis-
course on German tectonics proclaimed, were a universal language capable of
expressing the progress of structural ideas.
Iron would thus constitute the basis for the development of a modern architec-
ture and stand as the most representative style of the nineteenth century.12 Archi-
tecture would progress through innovation, on the programmatic and structural
side, and imitation, on the representational or artistic side. Like the use of language,
the perception of architecture would enable individuals to cope with the flux of
everyday life and societal progress by engaging their visual field with a grammar
and syntax in which they would be familiar and fluent.

Tectonics as Humanity’s Unconscious Manuscript

Renowned architect and architectural historian Gottfried Semper would expand

Schinkel’s and Bötticher’s discourse on tectonics from its focus on architectural con-
cerns into a vast historical exposition of the interrelated, if somewhat separate, evo-
lution of art and technological crafts, including architecture. Most notably, Semper
elaborated his ideas in his never-completed Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or,
Practical Aesthetics (1860). Like Bötticher, Semper understood ornament as a vital
artistic language developing in accord with practical, material matters. But unlike
Bötticher, Semper did not believe that architectural ornaments (especially those lim-
ited to ancient Greece) were meant to enlighten and enliven the public about current
building practices. Instead, the objective of ornaments, whose vocabulary was now
cast within a geographic realm far beyond Greece or Europe, was to point back
8 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

symbolically to primitive practices. The painterly or sculptural ornaments on a work

of architecture represent technologies of assembly, but those of bygone cultural per-
iods and craft traditions. Art, to Semper, complements and enriches construction by
embodying primordial motifs. Whereas construction responds to the pressing
demands of the day, artistic ornaments speak of a longer, deeper human legacy –
our impulse toward cosmic ritual and spiritual reinvigoration.
Given the importance Semper accorded to the early history of humanity, he too
rejected the idea that architecture had its origins in a single, prototypical building,
like the primitive hut. Ethnologist Gustav Klemm’s 10-volume General Cultural
History of Mankind (Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit, 1843–52) provided
Semper with a guide as to how different artistic and material practices might be
understood as part of cultural development. Klemm was one of the first great
collectors of decorative objects and practical industries from a wide range of cul-
tures. Rather than studying objects taxonomically, according to their morpholog-
ical similarities and divergences, Klemm looked into how objects reflected cultural
needs in a constant state of transformation. Art, material production, intellect, and
spirituality were bound up with each other. Cultural production was examined to
trace evolutionary trajectories, identifying regressive and progressive streams asso-
ciated with race and gender.13 While retaining many of these generalizations, Sem-
per developed his notion of the Kunsttrieb, or artistic impulse, in the light of
Klemm’s evolutionary tracing of the decorative arts. Could ornamental patterns
carry older symbolic meanings into new cultural situations? Might architecture halt
the erosion of meaning that had accompanied stylistic confusion by understanding
the dual path of cultural/artistic evolution?14
In an early essay on the polychrome architecture of the Greeks, Semper had
described how decoration, arising from different forms of religious practice, was
often simply attached to rather plain buildings. As worship developed, these forms
evolved beyond their initial contexts into transferable artistic symbols: “incorpo-
rated into the monuments themselves as a characteristic past.”15 What mattered to
the architect/historian was not one-time finished form, but long-term formation –
for it revealed the persistence of symbolic meaning and evidence of architecture’s
enduring intellectual quest. Beyond their practical functions, beyond their realized
technologies, buildings have long been sites for exploring and explicating what is
not practical and not known. Religious ritual, dance, music, art, and architecture
have accordingly explained the unknowable and, over time, the study of these arts
reveals the human record of that quest, the intertwining of daily and extraordinary
existence, of human technological capabilities and unrealized aspirations. In a much
more ambitious conceptual project than Schinkel or Bötticher’s unification of
Greek and medieval, Semper aimed to integrate the fine and practical arts within
the progressive artistic/material march of world technology and civilization.
This aim accounts for Semper’s demand to build practically in accord with static
laws, upon which building ornaments were applied, or the symbolic legacy of that
which, over the course of humanity, went beyond practicality. For his own
 German Tectonics 9

buildings, Semper borrowed from the Renaissance/baroque, feeling that it was the
most recently developed symbolic language that masterfully preserved and exhib-
ited messages of earlier traditions. A frequent designer of museums, theaters, and
concert halls, Semper logically regarded ornament as a festive and expositional
dress atop building. Art making was equivalent to the ritual and celebration that
accompany ordinary existence and survival, an innovation atop, not imitation
of, practical construction.16 As he wrote: “Architecture, like its great teacher,
nature, should choose and apply its material according to the laws conditioned
by nature, yet should it not also make the form and character of its creations
dependent on the ideas embodied in them, and not on the material?”17
Semper’s theory of tectonics divided into four elements that correspond to suc-
cessive historical periods as well as architecture’s material technologies: textiles
(enclosure), ceramics (the hearth), masonry (the mound or foundation), and wood
(carpentry, roofing, and tectonics). Textiles, the Urkunst, were the most basic,
appearing first in history: the knot corresponding to the primordial chain of being,
the fabric relating to humanity’s drive to clothe itself. So whereas Bötticher
regarded the Doric triglyph as the end of a beam expressing its load-bearing func-
tion, for Semper it was the unhemmed edge of a woven cloth.18
The textile art had a profound impact upon architecture even after buildings
were no longer dressed in cloth garments. Semper’s theory of Bekleidung (dressing)
was based upon the idea that, traditionally, raw constructional material held a sym-
bolic mask with accumulated historical layers. Over the long span of translation
from one craft to another, textile motifs used in stone construction preserved
the memory of the textile art and its intellectual/artistic meanings. The woven wall
was first translated into the wooden lattice, then stucco coating, clay mosaics, paint-
ing, and eventually painted polychrome and sculptural figures atop stone architec-
ture. Construction progressed as to its methods and materials, yet preserved
evidence of the representational moments of that progression via its ornaments.
Architects constantly met changing needs yet, through those portable signs, kept
humanity’s larger questions visually present. Those ornaments were what mat-
tered most for Semper, for they conveyed traditions and higher aspirations. “Even
where solid walls are necessary,” he noted, “they remain only the inner and unseen
support for the true and legitimate representation of the spatial idea, which is the
more or less artfully woven and knitted textile wall.”19 Indeed, through a process of
Stoffwechsel (metabolism or material transformation), Semper saw tectonics as the
production of cultural memory through material/technological metamorphosis:
“where an artistic motive is carried through successive materials and methods
of treatment.”20 Remade in different forms and materials, in its patterns and sig-
nifications as well as its contexts, these evolving/mutating forms carry forward ves-
tiges or residues of their earlier styles. Architecture thus encompasses both need
and reflection, drawing upon humanity’s book of mythic tales in order to create
what should be possible.
10 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

Conclusion

Tectonic discourse in nineteenth-century Germany signaled a momentous transi-

tion within architecture, radically transforming the classical tradition by the inte-
gration of several key modern sciences: technology, art history, and aesthetics.
Classical theory had always assumed that some form of continuity existed between
the mechanical and functional demands of architecture and their means of artistic
expression. During the second half of the eighteenth century, an idealized vision of
nature was replaced by the idea of a constructed, experienced, communicated
nature. Faith in a primary, ideal reality beneath both mechanical and representa-
tional actions was replaced by quests to understand the distinct, empirical reality
of each. Attention shifted to the mechanical actions within materials and building
systems, and the associated aesthetic reactions/representations of individuals and
members of national communities to those shifting systems.
In nineteenth-century theories of German tectonics, art or ornament became a
second, outer layer of reality within architecture. For Schinkel and especially Böt-
ticher, ornaments, drawn from the Greek temple, were conceptualized as a lan-
guage explaining and elevating programmatic requirements that lead to novel
structural actions. Kunstformen made the invisible or hard-to-grasp forces of materi-
als and statics understandable, giving them stability, balance, and unity. Extending
tectonics to iron, Bötticher’s theory became a means for architecture to move into
the future and yet remain, with respect to social communication, within a visual
consciousness drawn from the past. Semper went further, as ornament, for him,
was a means to embed cultural memory and spiritual imagination within the heart
of architecture’s more pragmatic actions.
In these and later theories,21 German tectonics built a bridge between classicism
and modernism, the discipline’s past and its dynamic, unpredictable future. But
despite its reunification of ornament with program/structure, a lack of consensus
on the precise ways this task was to be accomplished degraded these theoretical
efforts into various experiments in historicist ornamentation. By the turn of the
twentieth century, ornament had become a confusing and disruptive force within
pragmatic architectural endeavors. The separation of ornament from program and
structure by German tectonic theorists unintentionally paved the way for the unor-
namented building languages of twentieth-century modernism – the belief that raw
program and structure can themselves communicate the full range of architectural
sensations and ideas. But was the modernist dyad of utility and stability fully self-
referential? Modernism, like all earlier architectonic systems, never simply exhibits
its working materials without exploiting its powers to move and delight the public.
The German tectonic discourse, past and present, points to the fact that architectural
transformation does not proceed evenly within the realms of program, structure,
and representation. It raises the question as to whether architectural unity, or a mon-
olithic design research program, is even possible. No matter how irresolute its
 German Tectonics 11

pronouncements, it wisely cautions us that architecture is far too complexly inter-

twined with worldly and spiritual life to develop a seamless design approach. How
can architecture embrace novel programs, radically new constructional methods,
and unfamiliar, industrialized composite materials and still communicate fluently
and convincingly to its audience, while, in the process, creating great works of art?

Notes

1. Alois Hirt, Die Baukunst nach den Grundsätzen der Alten (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung,
1809), 14.
2. Alois Hirt and Heinrich Hübsch, Über griechische Baukunst (Berlin, 1823); Heinrich
Hübsch, Vertheidigung der griechischen Architektur gegen A. Hirt (Heidelberg, 1824).
3. Heinrich Hübsch, Über griechische Architektur, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: Akademische Buch-
handlung von J. C. B. Mohr, 1824), 34.
4. Goerd Peschken, Das Architektonische Lehrbuch: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Lebenswerk
(Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1979), 45, 50.
5. Scott Wolf, “The Metaphysical Foundations of Schinkel’s Tectonics,” ANY 14
(1996): 20.
6. Paul Guyer, “Kant and the Philosophy of Architecture,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 69 (Winter 2011): 11.
7. See Mitchell Schwarzer, “Ontology and Representation in Karl Bötticher’s Theory of
Tectonics,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 52 (September 1993): 267–80.
8. Karl Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen (Potsdam: Ferdinand Riegel, 1844), 20, 36.
9. Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, 44.
10. Karl Bötticher, “Das Prinzip der hellenischen und germanischen Bauweise,” Allgemeine
Bauzeitung 11 (1846): 115.
11. Bötticher, “Das Prinzip der hellenischen und germanischen Bauweise,” 116.
12. Georg Kohlmaier, “The Role of Iron in Architectural Theory in the Second Half of the
Nineteenth Century,” in Eisen Architektur: Die Rolle des Eisens in der Historischen Archi-
tektur der Zwiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Hannover: Curt Vincentz, 1982), 152.
13. Chris Mania, “The Growth of Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Gus-
tav Klemm and the Universal History of Humanity,” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 1
(2012): 16–31.
14. Harry Francis Mallgrave, “Gustav Klemm & Gottfried Semper: The Meeting of Eth-
nological and Architectural Theory,” RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 9
(Spring 1985): 68–79.
15. Gottfried Semper, “Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in
Antiquity,” in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis
Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 63.
16. Mari Hvattum, Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 65–6.
12 Structure, Materials, and Tectonic Expression

17. Gottfried Semper, “The Four Elements of Architecture: A Contribution to the Com-
parative Study of Architecture,” in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings,
trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1989), 102.
18. Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 292.
19. Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, vol. 2,
trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 2004), 248.
20. Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, 250–3.
21. See Mitchell Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 182–214.

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