Erich Mendelsohn

Mit dem 1921 gebauten Einsteinturm in Potsdam erlangte der junge Erich Mendelsohn frühe Berühmtheit. Die beiden Kaufhäuser für Schocken in Stuttgart und Chemnitz sowie der Kinokomplex am Kurfürstendamm in Berlin zeigten ihn bereits auf der Höhe seiner Meisterschaft: dynamisch-fließende Linienführung mit konstruktiver Klarheit gepaart in Gebäuden von expressiver Plastizität. Ab 1933 führte ihn die Emigration zunächst nach Großbritannien und Palästina, von 1941 bis zu seinem Tode wirkte er in den USA. Das von Bruno Zevi, dem Grand old man der italienischen Architekturgeschichtsschreibung, engagiert und einfühlsam herausgegebene Gesamtwerk ist ein fundamentales Kompendium, unerläßlich für jeden, der sich ernsthaft mit Mendelsohn und seinem Werk beschäftigen will. Eine Sammlung von über 1000 Skizzen, Entwürfen, Plänen, Modellfotos und zeitgenössischen Gebäudeaufnahmen, die Erich Mendelsohns Innovationskraft erschöpfend dokumentiert.

Noted German architect photographed American cityscapes in the 20s. New York's Times Square, Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn Bridge, Trinity Church, many other sites. Chicago's Michigan Avenue, Tribune Building, Federal Reserve Bank. Also buildings and locales in Buffalo and Detroit. Striking, dramatic views by trained observer. Newly translated introduction and captions. Reprinted from rare original edition.

"The present publication includes the work done by the MEAM Net research group at the Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with 27 institutions Europe-wide. This work, titled "One hundred houses for one hundred European architects of the 20th century", bore fruit in a travelling exhibition and a website"

The work of Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953) is extraordinarily open-minded in its attitude to material and planning, as a result of his completely original form of architectural thinking.

In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own—works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler’s Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul... François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus—a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years—resulted in his banishment... and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn’s struggles to write two of his own books—a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father—that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

Erich Mendelsohn, the most well-known of the Expressionist architects, first published this book, his Complete Works, in 1930 (the title is something of a misnomer, as it does not include his later, less successful work). It encompasses his wartime sketches, some of them no larger than a postage stamp, the seminal Einstein Observatory, and his splendid commercial work of the 1920s and 30s, including factories, office buildings, theaters, housing, and department stores. Over 50 projects are shown through period photographs, including interiors, sketches, drawings, and models. Reproduced here in full are all of the sketches Mendelsohn made when he was a soldier on the Russian front during the First World War, fine examples of his early work and some of the most intensely personal drawings to come out of his period. Also included is the first English translation of two lectures Mendelsohn delivered on his own unique vision of architecture and society.