Erich Mendelsohn

Erich Mendelsohn (21 March 1887 – 15 September 1953) was a German-British architect. He became known in the 1920s for expressionist architecture and later developed a dynamic functionalism in his department stores and cinemas. His 1921 Mossehaus design helped pioneer Art Deco and Streamline Moderne.

Biography

Mendelsohn was born to a Jewish family in Allenstein, East Prussia (now Olsztyn, Poland), at what was then Oberstrasse 21. A plaque on Barbara street marks the spot. He was the fifth of six children; his mother Emma Esther Jaruslawsky made hats, and his father David ran a shop. After a humanist Gymnasium in Allenstein, he did commercial training in Berlin.

In 1906 he studied national economics in Munich, then architecture at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg in 1908. Two years later he moved to the Technische Hochschule München, graduating cum laude in 1912. There, Theodor Fischer—whose work bridged neoclassicism and Jugendstil—influenced him, and he connected with the expressionist groups Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke.

From 1912 to 1914 he worked independently in Munich. In 1915 he married cellist Luise Maas. Their letters (1910–1953) document the life of an artist couple fleeing the Third Reich in 1933. Through Luise, he met astrophysicist Erwin Finlay Freundlich, who wanted an observatory to test Einstein’s relativity.

That connection led to the Einstein Tower. A family friendship with hat manufacturers Salomon and Gustav Herrmann in Luckenwalde also boosted his early career. During World War I, Mendelsohn produced many small sketches of factories and large buildings, often sent from the front to his wife. The 2011 documentary Incessant Visions animates these letters.

Architecture career

After the war, in late 1918, he set up practice in Berlin. The Einstein Tower and the Luckenwalde hat factory made his name. The factory (commissioned 1921) included four production halls, a boiler house, turbine house, two gatehouses, and a dyeing hall. Its modern ventilation hood expelled toxic fumes and ironically resembled a hat.

In 1924, Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst published a booklet on his work. That year he co-founded the progressive group Der Ring with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. His office employed up to forty people, including trainee Julius Posener, later an architectural historian.