Heinrich Ernst Schirmer: The German Who Rebuilt Norway
In 1841 a young architect from Leipzig climbed over the wreckage of Nidaros Cathedral at Trondheim. Norway's medieval coronation church had been burning and collapsing for five centuries; what remained was a partial ruin in a country that had almost no professional architects and no tradition of monument restoration. Heinrich Ernst Schirmer did the preliminary survey that year and completed his drawings by 1845. Reconstruction finally began in 1869. The cathedral standing in Trondheim today, the national shrine of an independent Norway, began as a set of measurements taken by a twenty-seven-year-old foreigner.
Leipzig, Dresden, Munich
Schirmer was born on 27 August 1814 in Leipzig, the son of Johan Gottlieb Schirmer and Johanne Sophie Kühne. He trained where an ambitious German of his generation trained: the art academy at Dresden from 1831 to 1834, then the academy at Munich from 1834 to 1837. Munich in those years meant Leo von Klenze, the architect who was converting Bavaria into a neoclassical stage set for King Ludwig I, and Klenze's influence marked Schirmer permanently — not as a style to copy, but as a demonstration that architecture could be an instrument of national self-definition.
A Country Without Architects
In 1838 Schirmer went to Norway. He stayed forty-five years, until 1883.
The move looks eccentric until you consider the state of the destination. Norway had been in union with Sweden since 1814, was engaged in constructing a national identity more or less from scratch, and possessed almost no trained architectural profession. A qualified German with academy credentials arrived into a vacuum. Between 1849 and 1850 Schirmer served as construction manager on Oslo Cathedral. He built the Ringstabekk estate in Bærum in 1851 and a substantial building at Moss in 1859. He designed the Botsfengselet, the penitentiary at Grønland in Oslo, work for which drawings survive in the Nasjonalmuseet.
He also brought with him what Norwegians came to call the Swiss style — a manner blending the Italian villa, Gothic Revival detail and neoclassical proportion, executed largely in timber with elaborate carved bargeboards and deep eaves. It became, over the following half-century, the defining look of the Norwegian villa, the mountain hotel and above all the railway station. Schirmer did not invent chalet architecture, but he is the man who naturalised it in Norway.
The Partnership With von Hanno
From 1853 to 1864 Schirmer worked in partnership with Wilhelm von Hanno, and the eleven years produced the bulk of his best-known buildings. Together they designed Gaustad Hospital, the great psychiatric asylum outside Christiania; Vestre Aker Church between 1853 and 1855; Tangen Church in 1854; and Østre Aker Church from 1857 to 1860. In 1854 they completed the stations along the Hoved Line, Norway's first railway — small timber buildings that carried the Swiss style down the length of the country and taught a nation what a modern public building looked like.
They also entered the competition for a Norwegian parliament building in 1856, part of the long contest that ran from 1836 to 1866 and preoccupied every architect in the country. Their scheme survives in the National Museum collection. Drawings for the Hoppe House and for Peter Petersens gård, both of 1858, and a series of designs from 1860 for a brick church seating 530, round out a collection holding that shows the range of a working practice: houses, churches, institutions, a parliament.
Institutions and Late Churches
After the partnership dissolved Schirmer kept building churches — Øksendal and Ørsta in 1864, Fiskum in 1866, Hareid and Vartdal both in 1877 — and turned increasingly to the largest institutional commissions available. The Rikshospitalet, Norway's national hospital, occupied him from 1874 to 1883. Ullevål Hospital dates from 1887, the year he died, on 6 December.
He had married Sophie Ottilia Major, who lived from 1821 to 1861. Their sons Herman Major Schirmer, born 1845, and Adolf Schirmer, born 1850, both became architects; Herman went on to a career of his own consequence in Norwegian architecture and heritage protection. In 1860 Schirmer was appointed a Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav.
Why Heinrich Is Called a Genius
The claim on Schirmer's behalf is not that he produced a masterpiece. It is that he supplied, almost single-handedly, the professional infrastructure a country lacked. Between 1838 and 1883 he built or co-built Norway's national hospital, its principal psychiatric asylum, its first railway stations, a run of parish churches from the Oslo suburbs to the western fjords, and the survey drawings that made possible the restoration of its most important medieval monument. Very few architects anywhere have had that much of a nation's public fabric pass across their drawing board.
The specific capacity involved was range under scarcity. Schirmer had to be a hospital planner, a church designer, a railway engineer's collaborator, a restoration archaeologist and a stylistic importer at once, because there was no one else to divide the work with. His skill in the Nidaros survey — reading a ruin accurately enough that reconstruction could proceed from it twenty-four years later — is a species of forensic draughtsmanship, closer to archaeology than to design, and it is the achievement of his that has aged best.
The counter-case is real. Schirmer was a competent eclectic rather than an original: the Swiss style he propagated was an import, his neoclassicism descended from Klenze, and his Gothic came out of the general European revival. He lost the parliament competition. His institutional buildings were serviceable rather than beautiful. And his prominence owes a great deal to a historical accident — that a trained German arrived in a country with a construction boom and no competition. Call him indispensable rather than brilliant, and you have it about right; but indispensability sustained across forty-five years and an entire building culture is not a small thing.
Legacy
Schirmer's afterlife runs through his sons and through the buildings that outlasted his reputation. The Swiss style he brought to Norway became so thoroughly domesticated that most Norwegians now read it as native — the timber villa with carved eaves is a national image, and its ancestry is Leipzig by way of Munich. Nidaros Cathedral, rebuilt across a century from his measurements, became the place where Norwegian kings are blessed. His drawings sit in the National Museum among the founding documents of Norwegian architecture, filed under the name of a man who was born German, worked in a foreign country for forty-five years, and helped a nation decide what it should look like.
Achievements
- Notable work: Strøm Church
- Notable work: Hamar Cathedral
- Notable work: Vestre Aker Church
- Notable work: Årnes station
- Knight of the Order of St. Olav
