Architectural Posters by German Architects

German Architects between Baroque and Neoclassicism

These seven architectural posters show how drawings can document completed buildings, organise an architect’s entire body of work or preserve an idea that was never realised. Balthasar Neumann’s animated South German Baroque meets the lucid formal language of Friedrich Gilly, Andreas Gärtner and Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Façades, sections, comparative surveys and perspective views reveal not only differences of style but also the path from courtly representation to Enlightenment architecture and Prussian Neoclassicism.

AP 503 · Balthasar Neumann’s Design for Langheim Abbey Church

The sheet reproduces Balthasar Neumann’s façade design of 1742 for a new church at the Cistercian abbey of Langheim. The proposed church was never built, which gives the drawing particular documentary value. Above a broad lower storey, the façade rises through several levels. Pilasters, curving window surrounds and a recessed centre lead the eye towards two onion-domed towers and the central roof turret. The architecture combines monumental order with the animated silhouette of the late Franconian Baroque.

At the same time, Neumann was designing the nearby pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen. The unrealised Langheim scheme thus belongs to the context of his major church projects of the 1740s. The poster preserves the material character of the historic sheet – the colour of the paper, traces of use, inscriptions and signature remain visible – presenting architectural drawing as both a working instrument and an autonomous work of art.

AP 115 · Balthasar Neumann: Buildings and Designs

AP 115 arranges churches, chapels, palaces, residences and administrative buildings from Neumann’s work as a typological survey. Small, apparently scaled elevations allow the architect’s remarkable range to be compared, from centralised church spaces and twin-towered façades to long palace fronts. His principal works include Würzburg Residence, the pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen and Neresheim Abbey Church. Neumann combined technical experience and the organisation of court building projects with an exceptional gift for complex spatial sequences.

The comparison on a single sheet reveals a basic principle of his work. Even large complexes are articulated by emphatic central axes, pavilions, changing roof forms and finely graduated wall reliefs. On the churches, towers and domes transform the façades into landmarks visible from afar; on the residences, the repetition of many window axes creates a representative yet rhythmically animated order.

AP 116 and AP 402 · Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Berlin and Potsdam

AP 116 assembles Schinkel’s buildings and designs for Berlin and Potsdam as a rigorously ordered survey of façades. The range extends from churches, gates and country houses to major public buildings. His defining Berlin works include the Neue Wache, Schauspielhaus, Friedrichswerder Church, Altes Museum and Bauakademie. Schinkel treated every commission individually, yet connected them through lucid proportions, precise detail and clearly legible construction.

AP 402 complements this typological view with perspectives from Schinkel’s “Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe” (Collection of Architectural Designs). Here the buildings do not appear in isolation but within streets, squares, gardens and river landscapes, demonstrating Schinkel’s understanding of architecture as part of a larger urban and natural setting. The Altes Museum, built from 1823 to 1830, opens towards the Lustgarten with a monumental row of 18 Ionic columns. The Bauakademie, designed in 1831, instead displays a structural clarity in exposed brick that points far ahead into the nineteenth century.

AP 504 · Schinkel’s Royal Palace on the Athenian Acropolis

After the Bavarian prince Otto became King of Greece in 1832, Schinkel was commissioned in 1834 to design a palace for the Athenian Acropolis. The idea originated with the Prussian crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm, later King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Schinkel himself never visited Greece. His unrealised scheme places low palace buildings articulated by colonnades and courtyards on the eastern part of the plateau, leaving the Parthenon and Erechtheion free as ancient monuments.

AP 504 presents two coloured views of the complex. Rather than a compact palace block, Schinkel developed an extensive sequence of terraces, peristyles and garden courts. The new residence was intended to respond to the topography and defer to the surviving temples without abandoning royal representation. Because it was never built, the project remained one of the great architectural visions of the 1830s – an imagined dialogue between modern monarchy, landscape and Greek antiquity.

AP 512 · Andreas Gärtner’s Design for a Roman Bath

Andreas Gärtner produced this design for a monumental bathing complex during his Paris years around 1780; the associated group of nine sheets in the Architecture Museum of the Technical University of Munich is dated 1778–1781. Gärtner had worked in Paris and Versailles since 1773, where the teaching of the Académie Royale d’Architecture had a direct influence on his work. He later became court building director for the Elector of Trier and, eventually, court architect in Munich.

The poster juxtaposes elevation and section. A long colonnade connects temple-fronted end blocks with a domed centre. In section, the calm exterior becomes a dramatic sequence of barrel vaults, coffering, columned halls and a great central dome. The unrealised ideal project translates the model of Roman thermae into the monumental, geometrically simplified architectural language of the late Enlightenment.

AP 305 · Friedrich Gilly’s Monument to Frederick the Great

Friedrich Gilly presented his design for a monument to Frederick the Great at the Berlin Academy exhibition of 1797. For Leipziger Platz he proposed not a conventional equestrian statue but a monumental complex that visitors could enter. A severe Doric temple rises on a massive, stepped substructure; walls, piers, obelisks and pools form a ceremonial precinct. The block-like volumes and powerful contrasts of light and shade give the project an effect that already reaches beyond the Neoclassicism of its day.

The monument was never built, but it exerted a profound influence. The young Schinkel saw the design in 1797 and decided the following year to study under David and Friedrich Gilly. AP 305 therefore preserves a key image in German architectural history: a vision in which memory is created not by decorative abundance but by space, movement, elementary geometry and the dramatic staging of light and shadow.