Gottfried Semper was a German architect, art critic, and professor of architecture, who designed and built the Semper Opera House in Dresden between 1838 and 1841. In 1849 he took part in the May Uprising in Dresden and was put on the government's wanted list.
Background
Semper was born on November 29, 1803 in Altona, German, the son of the wealthy woolmaker Gottfried Emanuel Semper (1768-1831) from Landeshut in Silesia, who came to Hamburg as a child, and Johanna Marie b. Paap (1771-1857), who came from a Huguenot family. After the closure, Gottfried Emanuel took over the management of the JW Paap, a wool factory that had been founded in Altona in 1651, and which belonged to his wife's family. Semper was baptized in the then Danish Altona. He was the fifth of eight children. Shortly after his birth, the family moved into a house on the "Hopfensack". After the French occupation of Hamburg in 1806 the family moved to Altona.
Education
Semper attended the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg before starting his university education at Göttingen in 1823, where he studied historiography and mathematics. He is said to have studied his subject under Friedrich von Gärtner in Munich (1825), though this is doubtful, but he definitely worked under Gau in Paris from 1826, where he became acquainted with Hittorff's theories of polychromy in Ancient Greek architecture.
Career
From 1830 to 1834 Semper travelled in Southern Europe, and in 1834 he published Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architectur und Plastik bei den Alten (Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity), a pamphlet dedicated to Gau, which created quite a stir.
While at Dresden (1834-1849) he designed some of his best buildings, including the Hoftheater (Court Theatre, 1838-1841, destroyed), a Cinquecento Revival building with an exterior that made clear what were the internal arrangements.
He also designed the eclectic Synagogue (1838-1840 - destroyed 1938) in a mix of Byzantine, Lombardic, Moorish, and Romanesque styles, with a polychrome interior of great richness; the Villa Rosa in a Quattrocento manner (1839 - destroyed); the sumptuous Oppenheim Palais in Cinquecento Revival (1845-1848 - destroyed); and the Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) attached to Pöppelmann's Zwinger (1847-1854 -
restored 1955-1956 after war damage).
Semper gained valuable introductions through Cole, and designed the Canadian, Danish, Swedish, and Turkish sections for the 1851 Exhibition in the Crystal Palace.
Semper taught design while in London, but his most remarkable achievement was his detailing of the great funeral-car for the Duke of Wellington's exequies (1852).
Disappointed with his lack of opportunity in London, however, he took up a teaching post at the Zürich Polytechnic, where he remained until 1871.
Semper won the competition to design the Town Hall at Winterthur, Switzerland (1862 - built 1865-1870).
In 1851 Semper had published Die vier Elemente der Baukunst (The Four Elements of Architecture) in which he identified those elements as hearth, platform, roof and its supports, and non-structural enclosure (of textiles, etc. ) to keep out the weather.
Having seen a Caribbean hut at the Great Exhibition, he found these four elements perfectly expressed, but believed that each of them could be subject to transformations, together or separately, and that those transformations could become rapid in a period of industrialization and change, as normal evolutionary processes would be subjected to enormous outside pressures.
In architecture, he noted how traditional and familiar forms retained traces of very early, primitive uses.
From these he derived his theory of style, and argued that architecture was reducible to the materials and processes associated with their uses.
Thus architecture should be expressive of its purpose and the parts of a building easily distinguished.
For example, he noted that the patterns and ornaments used in producing textiles might reappear on walls constructed of other materials, while swags or garlands on several buildings often reappear as sculpted or painted elements on friezes, and in their transformations the materials used are of no great importance.
Claims for Semper as a proto-Modernist are as absurd as those which hold Baillie Scott, Voysey, et al. were forerunners of the Bauhäusler, for he derided Viollet-le-Duc as a materialist, and could not accept that monumental architecture could be created using iron structures (he did not approve of Paxton's Crystal Palace).
He was, however, an influence on Semiotics (see semiological school).
The final years of Semper's architectural life were spent in Vienna, where his style became more florid than in his Dresden period.
He collaborated with Karl von Hasenauer on the design of the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Art History Museum) and the Natural History Museum (1872-1881), which face each other across Maria-Theresien-Platz: they are fine essays in the Italian High Renaissance Revival, and were built under the direction of von Hasenauer.
Semper and Hasenauer also worked on the Burgtheater (Castle Theatre), in an assured Renaissance Revival style (1872-1886) with a curved front reminiscent of the Dresden Opera House.
The grandiose and triumphal Neue Hofburg (New Palace - 1870-1894), where the double columns of the east front of the Louvre, a Roman triumphal arch, and various Renaissance Revival motives are quoted, planned to harmonize the Imperial Palace with the new Museums, and formed part of a great Forum, the plan of which was essentially Semper's, although von Hasenauer was mostly responsible for the realization of the buildings.