(b 9 Dec 1848; d Munich, 27 April 1913). German architect. He first trained as an engineer and then as an architect at the Munich Kunstakademie and is best known for his introduction of a Bavarian vernacular revival style. There were a number of points of departure, such as the revival of rural, wooden alpine buildings (‘Swiss Cottage’) and the idea of a ‘national’ style, meaning chiefly the Gothic revival. In the early 1870s a new German national revival style emerged, the ‘Deutsche Renaissance’, e.g. in the façade of the Schackgallerie in Munich designed in 1872 by the sculptor Lorenz Gedon (1844–83), which tempered the Italian Renaissance with a measure of rich but ungrammatical Northern Renaissance elements. Seidl turned for models to more ordinary kinds of urban houses of the 16th to the 18th centuries. In his first building, a restaurant called the Deutsches Haus (1879; destr.) on the Karlsplatz, Munich, he abandoned much of the heavy relief decoration then common on urban façades and resorted instead to a flatter relief, relying for decoration on the revival of local varieties of roughcast and rendering over brick, and on the application of a loosely handled kind of mural painting. His was a vernacular revival in the later 19th-century sense, distinguished not so much by identifiable motifs of architecture and decoration as by the revival of old methods of building craftsmanship.

• Seidl, Gabriel von
  • collaboration
    • Lenbach, Franz von
  • pupils
    • Bestelmeyer, German
  • staff
    • Fischer, Theodor
  • works
    • Concrete, §II, 1(i)(b): After c 1850: Reinforced concrete
    • Museum, §II, 2: Architecture, 1850–1940
    • Speyer