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Friedrich Gilly had his training in Berlin and never saw Italy. However, he had an opportunity of going toParis and London, and there could see the style of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and probably of Sir John Soane. But their influence ought not to be exaggerated; for before he went, he had designed one of the two masterpieces which are left us to bear witness of his genius - left, however, only in drawings. Neither was ever carried out. The first is the National Monument to Frederick the Great (1797), the second a National Theatre for Berlin - clearly a conception of the Goethe age.
The Doric portico without a pediment is a strong and grave opening. The semicircular windows, a favourite motif of the revolutionary architects Paris, though imported from England, add strength to strength, and the contrast between the semicylinder of the auditorium walls and the cube of the stage is functionally eloquent and aesthetically superb. Here we are close to a new style of the new century.
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