today stands Schinkel's Neue Wache) and produced an initial design, revolutionary in its use of shutters to control light. This, however, was never built, with the start of construction being delayed by Napoleon's conquest of Europe and shelved indefinitely by his decisive victory over the Prussians in 1806 and the punitive Treaty of Tilsit. Nevertheless, Hirt's ideas would take shape much later with the inauguration of the Altes Museum, the nucleus of present-day Museum Island Professor and lecturer With the museum postponed, Hirt published his seminal Die Baukunst nach den Grundsätzen der Alten in 1809, arguing for Neoclassicism in modern architecture and becoming one of the movements dominant texts. In the same year, he joined the Gesetzlose Gesellschaft zu Berlin intellectual society. In 1810, the art trader Christian von Mechel, who had reorganized what artworks were left in the palace of Sanssouci after French forces had plundered it, reminded King Frederick William III of the project to create an art museum in Berlin. 1810 also marked the foundation of the University of Berlin, with Hirt asked to be its first professor of art history and of archaeology. His students there and at the Bauakademie he had helped to establish included a whole generation of German classicizing architects - such as Christian Daniel Rauch, Karl Friedrich Schinkel (who he knew from his time at the Academy of Sciences and Arts), and Friedrich Weinbrenner. Weinbrenner went on to evangelize Hirt's architectural classicism at his own new architecture school at Karlsruhe, Baden. Under attack In 1815 the Prussian works appropriated by Napoleon to create a museum in Paris telling a comprehensive history of art were returned and put on public display at the Akademie der Wissenschaft, seen by Friederich Wilhelm himself. Impressed by Napoleon's short-lived universalist notion, Friederich set about forming one in Berlin. Hirt was a member on the committee ordered by Friedrich for this purpose, but suffered criticism from young art history students like Karl Ruhmohr and Gustav Waagen. From the 1820s Hirt'ss views and methods had increasingly become seen as too subjective and unscientific, though he retained influence at court. Waagen had studied the stolen works of Prussia in Paris and come to the conclusion that an art museum's prime focus was not national prestige or education, as Hirt argued, but the pleasure of viewing art. Waagen's 1828 pamphlet gave a detailed account of this competition, and asserted that quality