Is teacher and theoretician, Gilly was a founding father of c19 Prussian Neoclassicism and forged an essential link with contemporary architecture in revolutionary France. The son of an architect, he studied with Friedrich Becherer at the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin and went on to work for Carl Gothard Langhans and Friedrich Wilhelm Erdmannsdorff.

Langhans’s design for the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin (1785-91), modelled on the Propylaeum in Athens, marked the demise of the late Baroque style that had lingered in Prussia during the reign of Frederick II, and the advent of a new interest in classical precedent. Gilly’s intensive study of Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquity was stimulated by a six-month visit to Paris in 1797. Although he must certainly have encountered the work of Boullee and Ledoux, Gilly was particularly drawn to the designs of Francois Joseph Belanger.

Among the few buildings constructed to Gilly’s design during his short life were the Villa Molter and Palais Sohns in Berlin, and a mausoleum in Dyhernfurth, near Breslau (only the ruins of the mausoleum survive). Gilly’s lasting fame derives from his teaching at the Bauakademie in Berlin – where he was appointed professor for optics, perspective, and architectural drawing in 1799 – and from two unexecuted designs.

His projected monument to Frederick the Great on Leipziger Platz, Berlin (1796), takes the form of an octagonal enclosure entered through a massive arched portal topped by a quadriga. At the centre of the enclosure a Doric temple – probably derived from the Greek temples at Agrigento, Sicily – is set on a monumental plinth.

In another unrealized project, for a Nationaltheater on the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin (c.1798), Gilly gave a simple, geometric articulation to the principal elements of the theatre: a cubic block for stage and scenery, and a semicircular auditorium. A simplified Doric order appears both on the gable-less portico and in the interior scheme, while the Diocletian window favoured by Belanger dominates the exterior elevations.

As teacher and model, Gilly exerted a great influence on his pupil and natural successor, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. With the exception of the Dyhernfurth Mausoleum, now in ruins, none of Gilly’s buildings survive.

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