Constantin Lipsius

Who was Constantin Lipsius?

Johannes Wilhelm Constantin Lipsius was a German architect and architectural theorist, best known for his controversial design of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Exhibition Building on the Brühl Terrace in Dresden, today known as the Lipsius-Bau.

Lipsius was born in Leipzig. After attending Gymnasium, he initially studied architecture at the Leipzig Baugewerkenschule and in 1851 assumed a three-year course of study at the Royal Art Academy of Dresden in the atelier of Georg Hermann Nicolai, Gottfried Semper's immediate successor at the Academy. Following his matriculation, Lipsius toured Italy, where he was fascinated by the architecture of Venice. He continued his travels by heading to Paris, where he worked briefly for Jacques Ignaz Hittorf and became aware of he work of Henri Labrouste and Charles Garnier and Eugène Emanuelle Viollet-le-Duc. French influences became marked in Lipsius's later work.

Beginning in the 1860s, Lipsius participated in a number of regional and national architectural competitions while he continued to broaden his practice with residential commissions and preservation work. His participation in the 1866 competition for an Art Academy in Dresden exhibits several features that would appear in his final designs some twenty years later. Lipsius's winning entry for the reconstruction of Leipzig's Johannis Hospital garnered him professional recognition as königliche Baurat, or "royal architectural counsellor." In the following decade, Lipsius continued to expand his work. In 1874 he was named president of the newly organized Union of Leipzig Architects and assumed directorship of the Baugewerkenschule. In 1877, Lipsius started his long-term work on the preservation of Leipzig's Thomaskirche, J. S. Bach's church; work continued until 1889. Local preservation authority Heinrich Magirius has stated that Lipsius's work was the most significant accomplishment of its kind in Saxony. Also in the late 1870s, Lipsius began his professional association with architect August Hartel, which included designing the Peterskirche, the Johanneskirche and an entry in the second Reichstag competition of 1882.