Reviews Summer 2019

Abstract

A meander, signifying an indirect or aimless journey, could be considered a curious choice for inclusion in the title of a book about the life and work of Prussia's most prolific and industrious architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841). Yet the choice is an appropriate one, as what appears to be a conventional monograph soon reveals itself to be an experiment in a certain type of wandering, if not of the body, then certainly of the mind. In Schinkel: A Meander Through His Life and Work, Kurt W. Forster speculates that the process of intellectual wandering is stimulated less by academic than by lyrical essay writing (Figure 1). Etymologically derived from the French 'essayer', meaning 'to try', essay writing is always a form of trying, striving, and searching that goes hand in hand with wandering. The genre presumes a kind of circularity, by which the reader revolves ceaselessly around a subject without ever nailing it to the wall. It is perhaps for this quality of pleasurable evasiveness that some of the greatest essayists in the field of architectural history, from John Summerson to Reyner Banham, preferred the essay genre for addressing broader ideas by picking through the particular or seemingly inconsequential. For them, every building held the key to a good story, and facts were only worth telling if they were told elegantly.