Quondam | 1.7 |
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The following quotation capsulizes Vidler's analysis of the Altes Museum. |
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[S]chinkel's Altes Museum was to construct a new building type--"Museum"--suitable for the exhibition of a number of kinds of historical artifacts, in different combinations and chronologies. This required at once a more neutral and a more open structure: which nevertheless had in some way to "speak" of its historical function. The solution was to construct a building that allowed several routes and exhibition plans, while utilizing architecture and its own historical motifs to refer to the past. Schinkel, as is well known, combined three architectural types in one: the basic plan was that of a palace, a reference to the royal residence that faced the museum across the square. Inserted into its center was the Pantheon, emblem of historical memory. And for the entrance, Schinkel adopted not a temple (used elsewhere in London and Munich), but a stoa, the open colonnade of Greek democracy; a politically evocative choice. | Anthony Vidler, "Reconstructing Modernism - The Architecture of James Stirling" in Skyline, Novenber 1981, p.16-17. |
Stirling's Muses Part I |
Quondam © 2007.04.06 |