The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (28 page)

Karl Friedrich Schinkel was in the habit of conjuring fantasies. The sets he designed for
The Magic Flute
, in which the Queen of the Night rides a crescent moon through a galaxy of stars, are still used today. His
Panorama of Palermo
offered up a view of that city taken from a terrace at evening time, while his spectacles of the burning of Moscow and the Battle of the Nations inspired terror and awe in those who
saw them. Their fame quickly reached the ears of the king and queen of Prussia, who graciously engaged him to work for their family.

The bedroom he designed for Queen Luise, painted the most delicate shade of pink and hung with translucent muslin, evoked the delightful sensation of wakening at dawn in a gauzy tent. For her husband he made a replica of the Villa Chiaramonte, which the king wished to recall from a happy trip to Italy. Without even having seen the villa, Schinkel re-created it so convincingly that the king declared himself transported to the sunny Bay of Naples. For Karl and Wilhelm, the cadet princes of the family, Schinkel constructed another Italian villa, the Schloss Glienicke; and, facing it over the wide river Havel, the Gothic castle of Babelsberg, set high on a steep and wooded hill. But it was in Siam that Schinkel realized his most subtle flight of fancy—one so surely founded in history and philosophy as to be almost completely believable.

Alexander von Humboldt, who was sitting in the same dappled shade, was delighted with Schinkel’s story, for it closely modeled his own thinking on the history of nature. As he would put it:

The description of nature is intimately connected with its history; and the geologist, who is guided by the connection existing among the facts observed, cannot form a conception of the present without pursuing, through countless ages, the history of the past. In tracing the physical delineation of the globe, we behold the present and the past reciprocally incorporated, as it were, with one another; for the domain of nature is like that of languages, in which etymological research reveals a successive development, by showing us the primary condition of an idiom reflected in the forms of speech in use at the present day.

Schinkel’s tapestry of light and shade, garden and interior, land and water expressed perfectly the natural philosopher’s belief that nature and culture were not in opposition, but were, rather, symptomatic of—and sympathetic toward—each other.

Alexander von Humboldt was even more delighted that he had
been invited to live in the farmhouse at Siam whenever he wished, and to use it as if it were his own. Humboldt never felt at home when he was at home. His scientific expeditions to Latin America and to Russia and his diplomatic and professorial visits to the capitals of Europe should have satisfied his wanderlust, but they only made him hungrier. To stay in Schinkel’s confection would be to taste something of the joys of travel without any of its inconveniences: to recline under overgrown pergolas, in sight of Tuscan farmhouses, without actually having to go abroad. And here, free from the cares of city life, he could think, and write, and converse with wise and civilized men.

The prince of Siam completed the small party that sat on the bench in that sunny afternoon of May 1840. He felt every bit as pleased with himself as his learned and august friends, for that long postprandial ramble through tall tales and elevated conversation was as much his creation as theirs.

Since his youth the prince of Siam had dreamed of Italy. In 1828, he had gone to Rome for the first time, his progress to the Eternal City marked by stops in Venice, Florence, Naples, and all the other jewels in the crown of European civilization. He returned to the sandy plains of home determined that he could conjure from them the lush gardens and opulent villas of Tivoli. At his command, the gardener Peter Joseph Lenné laid out sinuous paths and elegant boscage, while expansive lawns and tall poplars called to mind the plains and cypress groves of the
campagna
.

And with Schinkel at his side, the prince of Siam created himself a villa. Not for the first time, the architect was called upon to construct a building from happy reminiscence. This villa was designed to recall the prince’s grand tour, as well as his readings of Pliny, who, in ancient times, had recalled his own residence with such pleasure. Its rooms were painted in the bold oxblood red and olive green of the houses of Pompeii, exquisitely decorated with
grotteschi
, and hung with painted scenes of the Bay of Naples. The furniture was designed to look as if it could be folded up and carried away to continue the prince’s travels. One bedroom was even decorated as a large tent, lined in blue and white ticking, inhabited by camp beds with awnings over them supported on crossed spears. It was the perfect place for a summer holiday.

Siam was a place of cheerfulness and liberty. The people of Siam tripped lightly home through the sunlit fields, rather than trudging through the dark and stony streets of great cities. Dressed in loose robes, they were unrestricted by the corsetry of European manners and customs. Leading simple lives, they were unencumbered by the rows of medals, the military parades, and the court balls that suffocated the spirit. The people of Siam were free: free of drudgery, free of convention, free of politics and history. They were happy.

And the prince hoped that, in Siam, he could be the same. On that spring afternoon in 1840, his realm had nearly been perfected. Schinkel’s farmhouse completed the view from the terrace of the villa, its pleasing mélange of architectures provoking exactly the sort of idle speculation in which the prince liked to indulge when he was at leisure. And Humboldt had perfected the picture by agreeing to come and spend a few months in it: the natural philosopher in perfect harmony with his habitation and with nature itself. It was going to be a wonderful summer.

T
HE OLD MAN
who had once been the prince of Siam leaned back and sighed at the reminiscence. Wonderful summers are always cut short, he reflected. A month after that sunny May afternoon, the prince had inherited the throne of Prussia. Schinkel died that very autumn, and Siam faded into memory. It hadn’t really been in far-off Siam anyway, but at the bottom of the royal garden in Potsdam. The prince had called his retreat Siam in a moment of whimsy, for he had hoped that it would resemble what he had supposed to be a land of freedom and pleasure.

The creation of Siam had been a rehearsal, nothing more, for it was but a small part of the magical demesne that would now be his home: a palace that had been made, the new king knew, so that he could be free of drudgery, free of convention, free of politics and history, free from care. That was why his new residence was called Sans Souci.

Sans Souci had been created a century before by the king’s great-great-uncle, who liked to be known as Fédéric. He had been a mercurial figure, and like his great-great-nephew he had longed to be anywhere else but at home. Unlike his descendant, however, he preferred France
to Italy, dreaming of the elegant manners and witty conversation of the salons of Paris and the court of Versailles—so different, he imagined, from his dull life in the forests and sandy plains of Prussia. “If God made the world for me,” he wrote, “he put France there for my amusement”; and when he ascended the throne, Fédéric decided to be amused. He couldn’t absent himself from his royal duties, of course, but if he could not go to Versailles, he could at least make its Trianons come to him. He repaired to the salubrious airs of his gardens, where he could escape the cares of his kingly office, saying, “Quand je serai là, je serai sans souci” (Once I am there, I shall be carefree).

In 1744, Fédéric engaged an old friend from his military days, Georg von Knobelsdorf, to build him a palace where he could be
sans souci
. Like any happy couple, they argued constantly, and Fédéric often took to the drawing board himself to correct his friend’s design. Terraces were laid out on the hillside upon which the dwelling was to be built, and the king decided to cover them with greenhouses, to supply sweet figs and vines and peaches for the royal table. Sans Souci was finished in 1747, and Fédéric took up residence immediately.

The palace was modest in scale, but its interiors were extraordinary confections, so delicate that they appeared to be spun from sugar, pink clouds, and sunsets rather than built in prosaic brick and plaster. In the music room there still stands the well-tempered clavier that was once played by Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1747, the irascible old man had been invited by Fédéric to come and teach him the principles and the art of music. It is said that the composer was unimpressed by the effete young prince and was all too ready to criticize his musical efforts. Next to the clavier is the music stand at which Fédéric would play the flute to his guests after supper. The architecture of this room dissolves in kaleidoscopic pattern: mirrors are framed in writhing rocaille and hung with soft candles, and the sparkling crystal chandelier hangs from a ceiling ornamented with a gilded trellis, hung with vines among which roll laughing, drunken cherubs.

Fédéric was an avid reader and had always adored the wit of Voltaire. In 1750, he persuaded the luminary to come and live with him at Sans Souci. (Their affair didn’t last long; the terrier-like writer could not resist biting the hand that fed him, and he fled after three years, returning to his niece—or, depending on whom you believe,
his mistress—in Paris.) Voltaire’s bedroom at Sans Souci was as witty and perverse as the writer himself. The ceiling was crazed with delicate tendrils of plaster roses, while the walls were inhabited by an exotic and arbitrary menagerie of monkeys, parrots, and ibises, garlanded with flowers and fruit. The philosopher might wake up on a summer’s morning, the sun streaming in through the tall French windows, and imagine himself in far Cathay or Cipango, until he heard the bark of Fédéric and his dogs on the terrace outside.

At the heart of Sans Souci was a dining room, for Fédéric loved nothing so much as conversation around the dinner table. His dazzling repartee would flit from art to mathematics, engineering to liberty, as he neatly sliced the fruits that had been brought in from his garden. Lunches and suppers, prepared by his two French chefs, were legendarily long, and the king would down endless glasses of champagne and cups of coffee. His dining room was a veritable temple to the pleasures of the table, an oval pantheon of Corinthian columns of white and gold, its dome inhabited by the cherubs and muses who personified the subjects of their host’s conversation.

The gardens of Sans Souci were filled with wonderful illusions of other times and other places. There was a Chinese pavilion for the taking of tea, whose roof, shaped like a gigantic tent, was supported by gilded palm trees, and whose verandas were inhabited by mandarins and concubines frozen in gilded attitudes of pleasure. There was a temple of friendship, to which Fédéric would repair to remember his dearest sister Wilhemine. There was a fully functioning windmill, in which the royal children could play at being peasants, and an endless forest of
allées
and
rondpoints
planted for the pleasures of the chase.

But the king reserved the best surprise for the departure of his guests. Leaving the sugary delights of the palace without care, they were presented with a mighty and somber ruin. There was the broken wall of some great amphitheater, reminiscent of nothing so much as the Colosseum in Rome; a dilapidated rotunda, formerly, perhaps, the residence of a philosopher; and a row of three Ionic columns that surely had formed part of the colonnade of some temple of Diana. It was as if the ancients had built a city upon this hill, once upon a time, and Fédéric had made his residence in its shadow.

It was all a delightful
plaisanterie
, of course, a postprandial memento mori, which the king hoped would provoke a wistful smile on the powdered faces of his philosophical guests. The ruin was conceived by Innocente Bellavite, a theater set painter from Italy. Bellavite, like Schinkel after him, was a conjuror of the lonely plains and rocks of the Roman
campagna
, where shepherds corralled their flocks in the shadow of broken aqueducts and peasants made their miserable habitations in deserted shrines.

In his magical demesne, Fédéric did nothing at all: he wrote, and played his flute, and held dazzling dinner parties, and ate the fruit that grew in his sparkling greenhouses, and contemplated the hazy mirage of ruins that closed the vista from his hallway. He lived without care,
sans souci
, as he had hoped. It was as if, inside the gates of the park, time stood still, and history was a seductive mirage.

Sans Souci was a fantasy. It wasn’t a real palace, a proper place to receive ambassadors and to undertake all the other tiresome duties of being a king. Fédéric had one of those sorts of places built at the bottom of the garden, so that he could do those sorts of things without interrupting his leisure. The Neues Palais was a baroque pile, topped by an arrogant dome and entered through a colossal hemicycle of Corinthian columns. It had countless bedrooms, rich ballrooms, an opera house, a shell grotto, and an art museum; but Fédéric couldn’t be bothered to spend time there. “It’s just a fanfaronade,” he said.