Neuschwanstein

One and a half million visitors per year can’t be wrong. For them the royal castle at Neuschwanstein is the pinnacle of every dreamer’s architectural fairy-tale. But for the architecturally educated, for adepts of Modernism, this stylistically crude, anachronistic monument to a prince’s whim is simply annoying. Admittedly, putting aside all positive or negative prejudice, it is impossible not to count this romantic recreation of a medieval castle on its breath-taking scenic site as one of the most spectacular pioneering buildings of European Historicism. Neuschwanstein is an extreme: never before have the charms of the natural surroundings and the tectonics of the landscape been used so consciously to create an effect within the overall architectural picture. Never have historical architectural forms been charged with so much existential meaning as by King Ludwig II, who believed that he could think himself back into the days of knightly chivalry merely by building. And architecture has never again been so frankly used as a setting intended to stage a life in terms of theatre, in other words been so liberated from its original functions. In withdrawing from reality, Ludwig thrust forward into the realms of the fairy-tale, which would otherwise have remained closed to architecture. It would also be possible to say: just as the hierarchically structured world of Versailles is a built symbol of the Baroque absolutist state order, so this residential castle of Neuschwanstein, almost inaccessible on its mountain-top, is a symbol of an isolated royal dreamer who wanted to give meaning to his anachronistic existence by flight into fiction and recourse to the glorious past. Gottfried Knapp is responsible for architectural reporting as cultural editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. He has written on contemporary architecture and urban development in almost all the specialist publications in Germany. Achim Bunz studied at the Staatliche Fachakademie für Fotodesign in Munich and has been working as an architectural photographer for 20 years. His photographs have been published in many periodicals and books including the book Gebaute Träume. Die Schlösser Ludwigs II. von Bayern by Michael Petzet published in 1995 by Hirmer Verlag in Munich.