Carl Gotthard Langhans was a Prussian master builder and royal architect. His churches, palaces, grand houses, interiors, city gates and theatres in Silesia, Berlin, Potsdam and elsewhere belong to the earliest examples of Neoclassical architecture in Germany. His best-known work is the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, national symbol of today’s Germany and German reunification in 1989/90.
The Brandenburg Gate in 1796
Carl Gotthard Langhans at old age
Głogów, Lutheran church (1764)
Wrocław (Breslau) Palais Hatzfeld (1765)
The Brandenburg Gate is an 18th-century neoclassical monument in Berlin. One of the best-known landmarks of Germany, it was erected on the site of a former city gate that marked the start of the road from Berlin to Brandenburg an der Havel, the former capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. The current structure was built from 1788 to 1791 by orders of King Frederick William II of Prussia, based on designs by the royal architect Carl Gotthard Langhans. The bronze sculpture of the quadriga crowning the gate is a work by the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow.
View from the Pariser Platz on the east side
An early 19th-century engraving comparing the recently constructed Brandenburg Gate to (an imagined restoration of) its historical model: the Propylaea of the Acropolis of Athens
Frontal view with the Pariser Platz looking west towards Straße des 17. Juni
The quadriga and bas-reliefs