Schinkel in Manchester 1826-2026

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An exhibition of architectural models by students from the Manchester School of Architecture of early nineteenth buildings in Berlin and Manchester created to celebrate the bicentenary of the brief visit of the Prussian court architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) to Manchester on July 17 1826. During his ‘English’ journey Schinkel was brought into direct contact with the industrial progress of Britain in many sites across the country. In Manchester, and specifically in Ancoats, he saw an industrial town developing at full spate. As Nikolaus Pevsner described it Schinkel ‘had never seen anything like that, and indeed could not have seen it anywhere else’. The exhibition compares six of Schinkel’s buildings in Berlin with six similar contemporary buildings in Manchester, by the architects Charles Barry (1795 – 1860), Francis Goodwin (1784-1835) and the anonymous ‘mere foremen’ (as Schinkel described them) who were building the mills and warehouses that were in his view ‘nothing but monstrous masses of red brick … without any trace of architecture …’