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

Schinkel 'in Athens: Meta-Narratives of 19th-Century City Planning challenges the view of Karl Friedrich Schinkels urban design legacy and his involvement in the design of modern Athens in the 1830s. It proposes a fresh appraisal of his work and its contextual analysis, challenging the view of his proposal as a utopian scheme.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 296 pages
Publication date: 24 March 2022
Publisher: Archaeopress

Schinkel 'in Athens: Meta-Narratives of 19th-Century City Planning offers a new perspective on Karl Friedrich Schinkel's urban design legacy and his role in shaping modern Athens in the 1830s. From the 1830s onward, the conflict between Schinkel's position as a civil servant and his passion for philosophy inspired by Fichte led him on a transcendental path. Transcendentalism established its own terms and conditions for understanding Schinkel's proposal for a palace atop the Acropolis of Athens (1834). 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, just a few hundred meters north of the Acropolis. While the two options for Otto's palace differed topographically, they shared a strong topological significance, which, along with other factors analyzed in this book, provides ample evidence for re-thinking the authorship of the new plan for the capital city of Greece. Schinkel 'in Athens, by all means!

Weight: 768g
Dimension: 245 x 174 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781803270685