Erich Mendelsohn

Architect

  • Born: March 21, 1887
  • Birthplace: Allenstein, Germany
  • Died: September 15, 1953
  • Place of death: San Francisco, California

German architect

Mendelsohn did at least as much as such better-known contemporaries as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to develop and popularize modern architecture. Even more fully than the other founders of the so-called International Style, Mendelsohn was the representative architect of modern world industrialism of machine, steel, concrete, and glass.

Areas of achievement Architecture, urban development

Early Life

Erich Mendelsohn (MEHN-duhl-zohn) was born to a well-to-do Jewish businessman of Russian-Polish background and a talented musician. Mendelsohn’s lifelong interest in musical rhythms and forms (with Johann Sebastian Bach his favorite composer) had a major impact on his architecture. As early as the age of five, Mendelsohn appears to have resolved to be an architect. After a year at the University of Munich studying economics, he switched in 1908 to the Berlin Technische Hochschule to begin work in architecture. Two years later, he transferred to the Technische Hochschule at Munich, where he obtained his degree in architecture in 1912. Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted for military service in the engineers. He served on the Eastern (Russian) Front until late 1917; then he was transferred to the western front, where he remained until the war’s end. In 1915, he married Luise Maas, a talented cellist; they had one daughter. The surviving Mendelsohn letters show a young man filled with restless energy and a strong creative drive. “Everywhere,” he wrote in 1913, “new ideas, new achievements. How can one possibly look on idly, and not, with every fibre of one’s being, desire to take a part?” As it was for so many others of his generation, the experience of World War I was an emotional and cultural watershed. “As few before us,” he would recall, “we felt the meaning of living and dying, of end and beginning its creative meaning in the midst of the silent terror of no-man’s land and the terrifying din of rapid fire.”

Mendelsohn had a lifelong interest in, and enthusiasm for, Greek art, the classical simplicity of which would inspire him. Yet the most important influence shaping his early architecture was his association with Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) group of expressionist painters led by Wassily Kandinsky. The keynote of the application of the expressionist aesthetic to architecture was that the character of a building should be determined by its purpose. The sketches that Mendelsohn did between 1914 and 1918 (many done while he was serving in the trenches) show his fascination with themes that would characterize his mature work: his attraction to steel, concrete, and glass; his fascination with the horizontal and broad plain surfaces; his juxtaposition of curved forms with straight lines; and his conception of a building as not simply a machine fulfilling its purpose but an organic unit, with each part belonging to the whole and each form growing out of another.

Life’s Work

Immediately after his demobilization, Mendelsohn started his own architectural practice. An exhibition of his sketches entitled “Architecture in Steel and Concrete” at the famous avant-garde art gallery of Paul Cassirer in Berlin created a sensation. What catapulted him into sudden fame was his design of the Einstein Tower (1919-1924) at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin; it was a combination of cupola observatory and astrophysical laboratory for further research into Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Although conceived in reinforced concrete, the main body was built in brick with a cement facade because of the postwar shortage of cement. The rounded shapes that compose the building, both in general mass and details, coupled with the deep window recesses are expressive of optical instruments while simultaneously conveying an aura of the mysteries of the universe. Further evidence of Mendelsohn’s virtuosity was furnished by his next two major projects. The first was a hat factory at Luckenwalde (1919-1921) consisting of four long sheds made up of a series of triangular concrete arches curved at the springing with brick walls and rubberoid roofing. The second was his addition to the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper building (1921-1923), done in collaboration with Richard Neutra. The structure consisted of a steel frame encased in concrete, with its long horizontal lines and horizontal windows in contrast to the vertical emphasis of the nineteenth century main building.

A major turning point in Mendelsohn’s development was his contact with the Dutch painters and architects of the de Stijl school, most important J. J. P. Oud. Mendelsohn took as his goal the fusion of the romantic free-form impulses of expressionism with the geometrically inspired rationalism of the de Stijl group. Perhaps even more influential was his visit to the United States in 1924, during which he met Frank Lloyd Wright and was deeply impressed by Wright’s call for an architecture reflecting the organic structure of natural forms. After his return, he published Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (1926; America: picturebook of an architect), containing seventy-seven photographs of the more important buildings he had seen, accompanied by his personal commentaries. Trips in 1925 and 1926 to the Soviet Union to oversee construction of his design for a factory for the Leningrad Textile Trust resulted in the publishing in 1929 of Russland, Europa, Amerika: Ein Architektonischer Querschnitt, a comparative appraisal of new developments in architecture in the three places. The finest expressions of Mendelsohn’s mid- and latter 1920’s architectural work were his department store designs: the Herpich Fur Store in Berlin (1924); the Schocken stores in Nürnberg (1926-1927), Stuttgart (1926-1928), and Chemnitz (1928-1929); and the Petersdorff store in Breslau (1926-1927). The distinguishing features of those stores was his making the front outer wall a screen of chiefly glass to maximize the natural light during daytime plus his typical emphasis on long horizontal lines.

Mendelsohn’s last five years in Germany, 1928-1933, were ones of intense activity, during which he had as many as forty assistants and draftsmen working for him. Many of his projects remained unbuilt, but the completed work included three outstanding designs. One was Berlin’s Universum motion picture theater (1927-1928), with an elongated horseshoe interior and curved balcony front that maximized the number of seats with an undistorted view of the screen. The second was his own home on a slope overlooking Havel Lake on the outskirts of Berlin (1929-1930); it is a masterful arrangement externally and internally of plain rectangular forms that succeeded in blending harmoniously with its site. The third was Columbushaus (1929-1931), a twelve-story office building at Postdamerplatz, Berlin, featuring a technically innovative steel skeleton with a facade of horizontal bands of glass and polished cream travertine.

In 1932, Mendelsohn was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, but in March, 1933, following Adolf Hitler’s takeover of power, he left Germany and settled in Great Britain. He first entered into a partnership in London with Serge Chermayeff; in 1936 he set up an independent practice. He became a naturalized British subject in 1938, and, in February, 1939, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The most distinguished of his British buildings is the De la Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-the Sea (1933-1935). A longish, low horizontal steel-and-glass building, the pavilion admirably fits in with the adjacent sea. Another typical Mendelsohn touch was his breaking of the long horizontal movement of the building by two semicircular glass projections enclosing staircases at each end of the central block.

After 1937, Mendelsohn’s principal work was done in Palestine. In February, 1939, he left Great Britain to make Palestine his home. Architecture in Palestine presented new problems for the northern Europe architect, such as keeping out rather than letting in the sunlight and handling the extremely wide variations in temperature between day and night. Mendelsohn’s success in adapting European modern architecture to this new environment is shown by the Chaim Weizmann house in Rehovot, near Tel Aviv (1935-1936); the Salman Schocken house and office-library in Jerusalem (1935-1936); the Government Hospital in Haifa overlooking the Bay of Acre (1936-1938); and the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Jerusalem (1937-1939). His most important work was the Hadassah University Medical Center (1936-1938) on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus, a complex of three reinforced concrete buildings faced with cream Jerusalem limestone arranged in narrow panels and narrow vertical windows. Perhaps the most striking features of his Palestine work were the orientation of the buildings to take advantage of the prevailing breezes coupled with the painstaking design of the surrounding gardens to complement the building masses.

The outbreak of World War II led to a halt in further building in Palestine. After unsuccessful efforts first to join the British army and then to obtain a war job, he left for the United States in March, 1941. Shortly after his arrival, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition of his work, and he received invitations to lecture at universities across the country. Lectures that he delivered at the University of California, Berkeley in April, 1942, were published two years later as Three Lectures on Architecture. With America’s entry into the war, new building came to a standstill. Fortunately, Mendelsohn was awarded in 1943 a Guggenheim Fellowship for two years. From May, 1943, to October, 1945, he lived at Croton, thirty miles north of New York City in a house overlooking the Hudson River; then he moved to San Francisco, where he resumed the practice of architecture. The first of his American buildings to be completed was the Maimonides Hospital in San Francisco (1946-1950). Its outstanding feature was the balconies with white balustrades that swung out in rhythmic curves to give the effect of lacy ribbons. Most of his American work consisted of designs for Jewish synagogues or temples combined with community centers. Four of these designs were built one in St. Louis (1946-1950), one in Cleveland (1946-1952), one in Grand Rapids, Michigan (1948-1952), and one in St. Paul, Minnesota (1950-1954), which was completed after Mendelsohn’s death to a partially altered plan. Mendelsohn died September 15, 1953, from cancer in a San Francisco hospital. He was cremated and, according to his wishes, his ashes were scattered in an unrecorded place.

Significance

Mendelsohn was given to philosophizing in rather ponderous Germanic fashion on the nature of architecture. In his 1942 lectures at the University of California, he took as his major target architecture that “instead of being in plan and appearance the true expression of a building’s utility, material, and structure, tried to hide its own life behind the lifeless ornamental features of a bygone society.” He identified as “the main issue of building: to simplify life in accordance with and in consequence of the technical inventions and scientific discoveries of our age.” The hallmark of that simplification was the quest for an organic unity.

Mendelsohn’s achievements were the more remarkable given that he lost one eye in 1921 because of cancer and the remaining one was weak. He was one of the fathers of the International Style, but he avoided the boxlike monotony that became associated with that school. A major reason for his success in doing so was his juxtaposition of curvilinear forms to temper his use of long horizontal and rectangular spaces. One example was his repeated use of the semicircular projection to break the horizontal movement of his buildings; another was his fondness for the spiral staircase. A second recurring theme is his adaptation of the structure not simply to the building’s purpose but to the natural environment of its site including the climate as well as the physical terrain. The most distinctive feature of his work, however, is genius for achieving an organic unity in which there is a oneness of exterior and interior, in which each part has a definite function in relation to the other parts, and in which there is the rhythmic continuity of the different parts appearing to flow into one other as an integrated whole.

Mendelsohn is less known than most of the other founders of modern architecture. One reason is that his inflexible and uncompromising attitude toward his designs antagonized would-be clients. Yet the major reason appears to be, simply, bad luck. Many of his most imaginative designs never got beyond the paper stage, and many of his most outstanding completed buildings were done in the backwater of Palestine. He also died at a relatively young age compared to such contemporaries as Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe.

Bibliography

James, Kathleen. Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. James analyzes all of the buildings that Mendelsohn designed in Germany to describe his architectural style and techniques.

Mendelsohn, Erich. The Drawings of Eric Mendelsohn. Edited by Susan King. San Francisco: California Print, 1969. This catalog of an exhibition of 133 of Mendelsohn’s drawings is invaluable for understanding his work methods and tracing the evolution of his architectural style. King’s introduction provides useful background. Included is a listing of Mendelsohn’s published writings and unpublished lectures, writings about him, and exhibitions on him.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Eric Mendelsohn: Letters of an Architect. Edited by Oskar Beyer. Translated by Geoffrey Strachan. London: Abelard-Schuman, 1967. These letters mostly to Mendelsohn’s wife before and after their marriage span the years 1910 to 1953 and constitute an invaluable source, illuminating Mendelsohn’s intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic development. An introduction by the distinguished architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner briefly but judiciously appraises Mendelsohn’s contribution to modern architecture.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Three Lectures on Architecture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944. These lectures presented at the University of California, Berkeley in April, 1942 constitute the fullest expression of Mendelsohn’s philosophical reflection on the nature of architecture. Required reading for students wishing insight into the intellectual presuppositions shaping and undergirding Mendelsohn’s work.

Pehnt, Wolfgang. Expressionist Architecture. Translated by J. A. Underwood and Edith Küstner. New York: Praeger, 1973. The volume has only a brief chapter directly on Mendelsohn, but it is the fullest available account of the expressionist impulse/movement in European architecture and, thus, important for placing Mendelsohn’s early work in context.

Von Eckardt, Wolf. Eric Mendelsohn. New York: George Braziller, 1960. Von Eckardt’s brief text for this volume in the Braziller Masters of World Architecture series is on the superficial side but provides a helpful introduction for the beginning student. The volume includes approximately eighty pages of illustrations, half of which are reproductions of sketches and models that were never built. Includes a chronological listing of Mendelsohn’s buildings and projects plus a bibliography.

Whittick, Arnold. Eric Mendelsohn. 2d ed. New York: F. W. Dodge, 1956. Whittick is an enthusiastic Mendelsohn booster and had access to Mendelsohn’s still unpublished letters, sketches, and plans. The text is written for the nonspecialist. There are 75 black-and-white photographs and 109 reproductions of drawings, sketches, plans, elevations, and sections.

Zevi, Bruno. Erich Mendelsohn. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. One of the leading architects of the present day, Zevi is a strong admirer of Mendelsohn. The volume consists of a brief overall appraisal, “Mendelsohn and the Path from Expressionism to the Organic,” followed by brief descriptions and analyses of his more important designs. Contains excellent accompanying illustrations.

1941-1970: 1956-1962: Saarinen Designs Kennedy Airport’s TWA Terminal.