The Schinkel-Album is more than a window onto drawings or the history of photography, however, because it itself was put on display at the Schinkel Museum soon after the architect’s death (albeit in another form: the CCA album is a remounted and rebound version of Bette’s three original albums, collecting most of their contents into one). The Schinkel Museum was established in Schinkel’s studio rooms at the Bauakademie in Berlin by order of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1844 and existed in this form until 1872. Its mission was to celebrate Schinkel the architect by collecting his paintings, sketches, drawings, and models and making them available to scholars, architects, and other interested visitors. In our terms, the museum’s archival and exhibition functions converged in one place. In 1858, Bette had proposed to take photographs of the drawings in the collection for use by architecture students and architects. With the approval of the Minister of Trade to make six prints of each negative, she issued five series of thirty photographs each, which she had bound into three albums. One set of albums landed on a portfolio cabinet in the middle of the Schinkel Museum, surrounded by a display of Schinkel’s studies of the frescos for the Royal Museum, set designs, travel and landscape sketches, and design drawings. Non-scholars were thus able to gain access to Schinkel’s drawings without actually disrupting them, presaging contemporary technologies that do the same.

The album’s value as a museum object makes a more general point about architecture exhibitions as well. With its paintings, sketches, drawings, and models, the Schinkel Museum recapitulated the art academy exhibitions at the same time as it confronted the very standards that underpinned them. The albums, which brought reproductions of drawings to the centre of the museum, directly challenged the values of uniqueness and authorship that were crucial factors in evaluating works of art. Whenever visitors looked up from the albums, they would have seen scholars looking at the drawings depicted in the photographs and recognised that Schinkel’s work was displayed with both originals and their copies. They also would have realised that many of these had something else in common: they pointed to buildings and landscapes designed by Schinkel that remained outside the gallery. The exhibition and the heterogeneous mix of objects it brought together showed that architecture could not be identified with one medium, making the important distinction between an architecture and an art exhibition. From their position in the middle of the museum space, the albums clearly made this point. It is exciting that the CCA has an artefact from the Schinkel Museum, Berlin’s first architecture museum and its second public museum, and fitting that this particular one illustrates the essential character of architecture exhibitions.

Wallis Miller, 2003-2004 Visiting Scholar
September 2009