IAR 221 Reading Response: Erich Mendelsohn and German Expressionism

     Erich Mendelsohn was a German architect working in the early 20th century.  This puts him in the same era as great architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, but while they worked in the same time, Mendelsohn was the antithesis of the "Cartesian" school of design practiced his colleagues.  Instead of the logical rational architecture being built by van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, Mendelsohn was one of a large group who favored architecture as a medium for expressing the power of emotion.

     Built outside of Berlin just after the end of World War I, the Einstein Tower is one of the German Expressionist's exemplary works.  Erich Mendelsohn, its designer, began sketching the tower during the war, and was commissioned to build the tower as a place for scientists to prove Einstein's theories of relativity.  However, Mendelsohn's plans called for the tower to be built out of concrete, which was hard to find in Germany after the war.  So the foundation was made of concrete, and the rest of the structure was built of brick and covered with a concrete stucco.  To van der Rohe and the like, this change in material could not be made unless the structure itself was redesigned.  But Mendelsohn disagreed, focusing more on the essence of the structure and paying less attention to what it was made of.  As long as the design of the structure remained the same, its physical composition was not an issue. 

     Of course, Mendelsohn was not alone in his way of thinking, just like how Le Corbusier and van der Rohe were not alone in theirs.  In 1914, Paul Scheerbart published an article called "Glass Architecture," in which he commented that people work and live in enclosed spaces.  He believed that in order for culture to move forward, the way people viewed buildings and structures must change; buildings must be more open and allow for natural light to penetrate the building.  Scheerbart and Mendelsohn shared the idea that architecture shaped culture, not the other way around (as van der Rohe and Le Corbusier might believe).

Final Thoughts:
--Erich Mendelsohn believed architecture to be a way of expressing emotion, which resulted in almost sculpture-like designs.
--His Einstein Tower was both a place to house equipment for scientists to test the theory of relativity, and a symbol of the power of the modern world that had been revealed during WWI.
--Fellow Expressionists such as Paul Scheerbart believed that a culture was defined by its architecture, and that for a culture to advance, it must first rethink its architecture and the values therein.

Image Sources:
http://www.kvl.cch.kcl.ac.uk/THEATRON/biographys/bioemendelsohn.html

http://www.3-co.com/Public/Technical%20Information/architecture.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Scheerbart