Carsten Krohn
For the book Erich Mendelsohn – Buildings and Projects (Birkhäuser 2021) I have been traveling for the last twelve years around the world to visit almost all of Mendelsohn’s remaining buildings. I took photos of the structures after studying what has been changed. It was both uplifting to experience the sites and spaces, but also shocking to see how much of his work is already lost or in danger to be destroyed. On the other hand I found buildings that I didn’t expect, like the gate house at the cemetery in Kaliningrad. I would like to present at the conference my comprehensive photographic documentation and show the architecture from a perspective of today, which is to a large extend unknown to scholars. Mendelsohn’s own house in Berlin, for example, is known only through the historic photos of the time it was built. In my presentation I plan to speak also of Mendelsohn’s contextualism that I was able to investigate through the experience of visiting the sites.
Carsten Krohn was born in Hamburg and studied architecture, urban planning and art history at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg and the University of Hamburg as well as at Columbia University in New York. He received his doctorate in art history on the impact history of Buckminster Fuller in architecture. Carsten Krohn worked as an architect in the Berlin offices of Daniel Libeskind and Norman Foster and taught at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the Technical University Berlin, the Humboldt University Berlin and as a professor at the University of Anáhuac and the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico. He is the author of books on the work of Peter Behrens, Mies van der Rohe and Hans Scharoun, curated the exhibition The Unbuilt Berlin and worked on video projects with Knut Klaßen. His photographs have been shown in numerous exhibitions.