Michele Stavagna
This paper reconstructs Mendelsohn’s ideas about social housing in the early 1930s. Then, the international debate and the foundation of the CIAM prompted him to define his own position about it. Mendelsohn thought the core meaning of dwelling to be a matter of privacy as self- isolation from the world. He envisioned a technical update of the traditional house that adapted the suite apartment to German customs. To foster social aims, he asserted common facilities and mixed functions to be part of residential settlements.
In mid 1920s, Mendelsohn designs a mixed housing and commercial facilities settlement ‒ the WOGA Complex in the west side of Berlin. The project nature changes in the early 1930s. The housing for middle-class customers develops into a housing for low-income rental with high user turnover. Mendelsohn seeks now to play an active role in the public discussion on “minimum dwelling” among the European modernist scene. He plans a big Apartment House, adding three more smaller apartment houses joined together ‒ the “Kreuzhäuser”. Mendelsohn makes an implicit reference to it in an article of late May 1931, “Group No. 1 – Group No. 2”, which addresses the topic of modern housing and appears in the catalogue of the SOWO exhibition. This market fair show runs parallel to the German Building Exhibition in Berlin 1931. Mendelsohn’s client and publisher Lachmann-Mosse sponsors it to promote modern interior design. Mendelsohn’s text is also related to his brief joining the German chapter of the CIAM. He attends the CIAM special meeting in Berlin. Here, in June 1931, his ideas find a hostile reception by the left front of the young modernist architects. One year later, the book on his own house Am Rupenhorn and his solution for a low-cost Growing House meet an unfavorable reception. The then rising economic and political crisis in Germany undermines any mass market solution for the housing problem.
After his forced emigration in 1933, Mendelsohn tries to carry on his vision in a major project for the London White City in 1935. With his new partner Serge Chermayeff, he claims now the need of a public actor to manage it. This would better balance social aims and market value of this huge-scale project. The economic depression prevents an implementation of this ambitious plan. Mendelsohn’s ideas remain statements on paper. They linger though as premonition of issues that the architectural debate will only address later in postwar times.
Michele Stavagna studied architecture and the history of architecture at the Università IUAV in Venice. He obtained a PhD in the History of Architecture and Urban Design with a study on the photo books designed by Erich Mendelsohn in the 1920s. Michele Stavagna’s research focuses on the modernist architecture and design in the context of modern mass society. Other major research topics are the photographic medium in architectural theory of the 20th century and the Work of Erich Mendelsohn. He has taught Theory and History of Industrial Design at the Università degli Studi di Trieste (Italy) and has given lectures at various European universities and at symposiums in Europe and the USA. He has written many articles on his researches and is editor and translator of the Italian edition of Die Baukunst der neuesten Zeit by Gustav Adolf Platz (Compositori: Bologna 2010). He is the author (with Carsten Krohn) of the monograph Erich Mendelsohn ‒ Buildings and Projects (Birkhäuser: Basel 2021) and has in preparation a book on the Luckhardt Brothers and Alfons Anker. Since 2005, Michele Stavagna lives and works in Berlin and is a correspondent for the magazine der architekt.