Gottfried Semper

Independent activity Russian revolutionary democrats 1803–1879 ○ Natural causes

Architect of the Dresden court theatre who built barricades in the May Uprising of 1849 and went into exile

Born in 1803 into a well-to-do industrialist family in Hamburg, he studied at Göttingen and Munich and was in Paris when the July Revolution of 1830 broke out. In 1834 he became professor of architecture at the Dresden academy, where he built the court theatre (1838–1841) and a synagogue. A convinced republican, he took a leading role with his friend Richard Wagner in the May Uprising of 1849, serving in the civic guard and building barricades. When the rising collapsed he was put on the wanted list and fled, by way of Paris, to London in 1850, where he wrote The Four Elements of Architecture (1851). In 1855 he became professor at the new polytechnic in Zürich. The Saxon warrant for his arrest was kept in force until 1863. In 1871 he moved to Vienna to build the museums and Burgtheater of the Ringstraße. He died in Rome in 1879.