KARL GUSTAV STEPHANI, 1902-1903, AND
CHRISTIAN RANCK, 1907
Henning refrained from embodying his ideas about the
St. Gall house in a visual form, and in the fifty years that
followed, this theory found neither support nor acceptance.
The views expressed in Karl Gustav Stephani's encyclopedic
work on the early German dwelling and its furnishings,[38]
as well as those in Christian Ranck's percursory but
widely read cultural history of the German farmhouse,[39]
are literal repetitions of Julius von Schlosser and show that
the work of even those who specialized in the history of the
German house was still entirely under the spell of the
thinking of the classicist. But in the third decade of this
century, the method that Henning had initiated, namely,
that of attempting to reconstruct the St. Gall house in the
light of its modern derivatives rather than of its historical
prototypes, found a sudden revival in a number of visual
reconstructions that marked a complete departure from
the thinking of the classical school. These reconstructions
(figs. 277-281) came from the hands of men who were not
primarily historians but professional architects, and they
were the product of intuitive speculation rather than of
documentative historical study. The first of these was made
by H. Fiechter-Zollikofer in 1936.