SCHICKHARDT, Heinrich II
German architect. He came from a family of craftsmen: his grandfather, Heinrich Schickhardt I (1464-1540), was a wood-carver and his father, Lukas Schickhardt I (1511-1585), was a wood-carver, master builder and clerk of works. After a five-year apprenticeship as a joiner and a period as a journeyman, Heinrich Schickhardt II was employed from 1578 by Georg Beer (1527-1600), then Land Architect of Württemberg, preparing wooden models of new building projects and carving organ fronts and memorial plaques. By 1586 he had progressed to working independently, building town houses and noblemen’s castles; during 1586-89 he was responsible for the new ashlar façade, in the style of the German Renaissance, on the old half-timbered town hall of Esslingen.
Schickhardt’s career proper began with his appointment in 1592 as architect to the Dukes of Württemberg; he became chief architect for the ducal estates that lay to the west of the River Rhine. From 1598 he extended the town of Mömpelgard (French: Montbéliard) to an ordered plan. In 1599 he began to draw up a plan for the new town of Freudenstadt, intended by Friedrich as a military and commercial base. He designed here the church with L ground plan.
In 1600 Duke Friedrich asked Schickhardt to revise his plans of 1599 for the Neuer Bau, an extension to the Altes Schloss in Stuttgart (1611; destroyed 1778). This was Schickhardt’s most important project, in which he combined a number of native traditions with a grasp of Italianate proportion.
Schickhardt was the Duke’s favourite court architect, from 1595 until his patron’s death in 1608, he was employed on building projects in Mömpelgard, and in the Württemberg estates in Alsace, and in Burgundy and Lorraine. The counts of Baden and Hohenlohe, local nobility and the rulers of free imperial cities were among his other clients.
Schickhardt’s buildings are characterized by solid, craft-based constructional methods, since a good understanding of engineering science was expected from the architectural profession at that time. He himself designed machines, developed the economic use of timber and built mills, well-houses and mines.
Schickhardt influenced architecture in Württemberg for nearly 50 years. Buildings such as the church of St Martin (1601-07), Mömpelgard, and the bell-tower of Cannstatt Church (1612-13) with its piled-up storeys served as models to succeeding generations of architects.
