The Anti-Historicist Historicism of German Romantic Architecture

Nineteenth-century German architecture was characterized by a conflict between the availability of multiple historically derivative styles and the demand for the establishment of a culturally appropriate normative one. This conflict resulted from an aesthetic historicism that posited the cultural specificity of architectural styles while simultaneously abstracting them from their original contexts. Because the same aesthetic, ideological, and functionalist claims could be and were advanced on behalf of different styles, the prolonged debate among German architectural writers and practitioners about which one should be favored proved irresolvable so long as it was assumed that a style must be historically referential.