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 Schinkel s urban design legacy and his involvement in the design of modern Athens in the 1830s. From the 1830s onwards, the incompatibility between Schinkel s 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 Schinkel s project of a palace atop the Acropolis of Athens (1834) might be understood. The contextual analysis of Schinkel s 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 Otto s 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!