Classicism Orientalized: Decoding the Logic of the Prussian non-Mosque

Designed and built in the early 1840s by the Prussian architect Ludwig Persius (1803-1845) the Steam Engine Building (das Dampfmaschinenhaus) also known as “the Mosque” of Potsdam is an early and concentrated example of using Islamic architectural vocabulary, consciously borrowed from the published study of Mamluk monuments in Cairo, for a modern industrial building in Europe. Even if – at the first glance – reminiscent of some Mamluk era (1250-1570) buildings as depicted by Pascal Coste in his “Architecture arabe; ou, Monuments du Kaire, mesurés et dessinés, de 1818 à 1826”, at a closer look the design of the Steam Engine House speaks to the universality of classicist architectural principles specifically of mathematically guided proportions, the modular commensurability of the parts and the whole, the orderly and regulating use of ornament.

This project uses the Steam Engine Buidling of Sanssouci in Potsdam as a leverage point to interrogate the process of encoding the logic of classicist architectural theory in the 19th century historicist narrative of geographic and chronological styles. Theoretically inclined architects mobilized “styles” – the discrete and supposedly internally cohesive elements of historic process in art and architecture – as a source of empirical evidence for the universality of normative architectural principles, abstracted from their original Greco-Roman visual language and reduced to pure logic. No longer based on metaphysical postulates or the philosophy of nature, normative architectural theory simultaneously anchored itself in history and started to modify historic styles in its likeness. The Steam Engine Building is unveiled as an object reflecting the early stage of this process that went beyond historiography, first into architectural design in Europe and later, with the expansion of colonial empires, into the conservation and restoration of the actual non-Western monuments.