Schinkel in Athens: Meta-Narratives of 19th-Century City Planning

Schinkel in Athens: Meta-Narratives of 19th-Century City Planning proposes a fresh appraisal of Karl Friedrich Schinkels urban design legacy and his involvement in the design of modern Athens in the 1830s. From the 1830s onwards, the incompatibility between Schinkels position as a civil servant and his vocation as a scholar inspired by Fichte led him along a transcendental path of life. Transcendentalism set its own terms and conditions under which Schinkels project of a palace atop the Acropolis of Athens (1834) might be understood. The contextual analysis of Schinkels work in this book challenges the view of this proposal as a utopian scheme, detached from the realities of nineteenth-century Greece. On the other hand, the first plan of Athens, supposedly the work of two of his former Bauakademie students, ratified a year earlier, in 1833, proposed the location of the royal residence in the new town at a few hundred metres north of the Acropolis. But, though the two options for Ottos palace were topographically dissimilar they did retain a common strong, topological significance which, along with other factors analysed in this book, provides ample evidence for re-thinking the authorship of the new plan of the capital city of Greece. Schinkel in Athens, by all means!