Erich Mendelsohn S Amerika

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.

In America between 1946 and 1953, the German-Jewish architect Eric Mendelsohn planned seven synagogues, of which four were built, all in the Midwest. In this book, photographer Michael Palmer has recorded in exquisite detail Mendelsohn's four built synagogues in Saint Paul, Saint Louis, Cleveland, and Grand Rapids. These photographs are accompanied by an insightful contextual essay by Ita Heinze-Greenberg which reflects on Eric Mendelsohn and his Jewish identity. Mendelsohn's post-war commitment to sacred architecture was a major challenge to him, but one on which he embarked with great enthusiasm. He sought and found radically new architectural solutions for these "temples" that met functional, social, and spiritual demands. In the post-war and post-Holocaust climate, the old references had become obsolete, while the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 posed a claim for the redefinition of the Jewish diaspora in general. The duality of Jewish and American identity became more crucial than ever and the congregations were keen to express their integration into a modern America through these buildings. Hardly anyone could have been better suited for this task than Mendelsohn, as he sought to justify his decision to move from Israel and adopt the USA as his new homeland. The places he created to serve Jewish identity in America were a crowning conclusion of his career. They became the benchmark of modern American synagogue architecture, while the design of sacred space added a new dimension in Mendelsohn's work.

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.

Reveals Ann Tizia Leitich, American correspondent for Austrian newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s, as an important cultural mediator between the two countries.

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.

Buffalo, in New York state, is 'ineffable': a typical city in transition between its past and future. It is a classic example of one of many 'shrinking cities' in North America and elsewhere which once prospered because of heavy industrialization, but which now have to deal with various degrees of urban decay. Bringing together a range of scholars from the humanities, the social sciences, art and architecture, this volume looks at both the literal city image and urban representation generated by photographs, video, historical and contemporary narratives, and grass-root initiatives. It investigates the notion of agency of media in the city and, in return, what the city’s agency is. This agency matters particularly as it is both transforming - shrinking, fading, being redefined - and being shaped through its visual and spatial mediation. While illustrated by Buffalo in particular, the book examines a broader phenomenon: the identity of those cities that were built and blossomed during the late 19th and early 20th century and are now in different stages of decline and disintegration. However, while such cities are all confronted with complex issues of economic instability, social and racial segregation, urban sprawl and shrinking processes both in the inner city and more and more in their ex-urban belts, they are too often described through dramatically simplifying visual and linguistic tropes. In Buffalo such tropes refer dialectically either to the city’s past glory or its presumed current cultural, political and economical stasis and decline. This book takes such tired, and familiar tropes and questions them.

An essential exploration of how Russian ideas about the United States shaped architecture and urban design from the czarist era to the fall of the U.S.S.R. Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. Jean-Louis Cohen traces the powerful concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in Revolutionary America, through the spectacular World’s Fairs of the 19th century, to department stores, skyscrapers, and factories built in Russia using American methods during the 20th century. Visions of America also captivated the Russian avant-garde, from El Lissitzky to Moisei Ginzburg, and Cohen explores the ongoing artistic dialogue maintained between the two countries at the mid-century and in the late Soviet era, following a period of strategic competition. This first major study of Amerikanizm in the architecture of Russia makes a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics.