Mendelsohn, Erich (1887–1953)
October 27, 2009 | In: Architectural History
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Erich Mendelsohn was born in 1887 in Allenstein, East Prussia, now Poland. He studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule of Berlin, and upon finishing his education he was introduced to expressionism and became associated with the Blaue Reiter group. After the Einstein Research Laboratory, his first commission, Mendelsohn obtained such urban architectural projects as the Schocken Department stores in Nuremberg and Chemnitz, and Columbushaus in Berlin. In 1933, he emigrated to England, keeping studios in both London and Jerusalem. He moved to the United States in 1941, taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed various projects, including synagogues, community centers and a hospital, until his death in 1953.
Throughout his career, Mendelsohn talked about his work in terms of ‘dynamic functionalism,’ which referred to feeling, imagination, and ‘…expression in movement of the forces inherent in building materials’ (Pehnt, 1973, p. 125). He used these fluid qualities of the expressionist movement in his design for the Einstein Research Laboratory. It was intended to be built in the plastic material of concrete, but was eventually made of brick with a sculptural layer of concrete on top. Mendelsohn’s architecture has been tied to expressionism and futurism and is often considered a precursor to modernism. His buildings, such as the Schocken Department stores, convey his concern for the strong
horizontals of motion and the layering of transparency and solidity. His use of concrete, steel, and glass speaks of the human-made world of the machine. Mendelsohn had great interest in sketching throughout his lifetime; he would send sketches home from his post at the Russian front, writing that they were representative of a type of architecture he wanted to create. Some of these wartime sketches resemble flowing sand dunes and may have inspired his early architecture.
This is a page of possibilities for the façade and volumetric massing of the Columbushaus project. All of the sketches contain strong horizontal lines, precursors for the repetitive ribbon windows. The lines, each representing one floor of the building, reveal Mendelsohn’s concern for scale in these early attempts. The façade, with its curvature or straightness yet to be determined, considers its relationship to the urban edge of the street: some sketches include first floor shops. Although located on a busy street in Berlin, the building is sketched so as to ignore the context. The
sketches that are circled or have an arced horizon may be acting as background or simply denoting the more promising proposals. The articulation and emphasis on the corner is seen in the finished building which is curved at one end. The final work of construction for the Columbushaus was to lift the top story, like a cap. In these sketches, the many alternatives for this accented upper floor can be seen.
Mendelsohn’s technique is characterized by quickly drawn, confident, bold lines, which are straight and double back on themselves in their swiftness. He used ink to create these dark and definitive lines; this fluid media best represented his ideas for a fluid architecture. He wanted to analyze the entire building quickly and did not rework or erase a specific image, but continued to redraw the images until they matched the concept in his mind’s eye. Two variations on a curved iteration and six variations on the straight proposal might explain a discrepancy in the techniques of the sketch.
The fact that Mendelsohn was not taking time to erase or cross out his sketches may indicate how he was thinking. Once an image reached a certain level of completion, he evaluated it and then moved on to the next. The wholeness of each sketch was necessary for its evaluation and critique.
