Karl Friedrich Schinkel (13 March 1781 – 9 October 1841) was a Prussian architect, city planner and painter who also designed furniture and stage sets.

At that time, the architectural taste in Prussia was shaped in Neoclassical style, mainly by Carl Gotthard Langhans, the architect of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

[citation needed] Working for the stage, in 1816 he created a star-spangled backdrop for the appearance of the "Königin der Nacht" in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, which is even quoted in modern productions of this perennial piece.

In this position, he was not only responsible for reshaping the still relatively unspectacular city of Berlin into a representative capital for Prussia, but also oversaw projects in the expanded Prussian territories from the Rhineland in the west to Königsberg in the east, such as New Altstadt Church.

Although the buildings themselves have long been destroyed, portions of a stairwell from the Weydinger House were able to be rescued and built into the Nicolaihaus on Brüderstr.

Schinkel's Bauakademie (1832–1836), his most innovative building, eschewed historicist conventions and seemed to point the way to a clean-lined "modernist" architecture that would become prominent in Germany only toward the beginning of the 20th century.

It has been speculated, however, that due to the difficult political circumstances – French occupation and the dependency on the Prussian king – and his relatively early death, which prevented him from seeing the explosive German industrialization in the second half of the 19th century, he was not able to live up to the true potential exhibited by his sketches.