Tim Altenhof
Chimneys often mark the vertical pivot of a living room: as outlets of a fire place, they do not simply add an exhaust to dwelling houses but serve as important components of social spaces. Sometimes chimneys are so large that they comprise an entire building.
Erich Mendelsohn’s Steinberg, Herrmann & Co. hat factory at Luckenwalde, whose destiny is currently up in the air, is one such case. It has been widely discussed both in terms of construction and function. A multi-faceted roof on top of the dye works served to ventilate the interior space, and it still evokes images of the hats that were once produced inside. In the words of Luise Mendelsohn, Erich’s wife, the principle of this “chimney-like hood” was a “very simple one.” By contrast, most architectural historians portrayed the dye works as a technical innovation. The objective of this paper is twofold: for one, it will situate the hat factory within a prehistory of modernity, and it will attempt to shed some light on the status quo. Ventilation debates on health and experimental hygiene throughout the nineteenth century framed the chimney as a pneumatic device, doing the work that was necessary to discharge human exhalations from dwellings. The works of experimental hygienists in particular have raised awareness about the consequences of encasing breathing subjects, and they took concerns with ventilation increasingly seriously. Max von Pettenkofer or József Fodor, for instance, promoted the idea of the house-as-chimney, ascribing properties of the chimney to the house as a whole. If these debates were rather anthropocentric, considering breathing humans as the major polluters inside a building, in the case of Luckenwalde the toxic fumes accruing inside developed from the dyeing of felt required for the production of hats. Concepts to come to terms with both types of pollution, however, were similar in kind. The underlying assumption was that our lungs and with it our bodies are vulnerable to air pollution. If one would intuitively associate an organ with a period, it would no doubt be the eye with the Renaissance, the brain with the Enlightenment, and certainly the human lung with modernism. Rising from the dye vats, the steam at Luckenwalde could afflict some of the workers with pneumonia, except that it did not. A less famous cross section from the Renaissance could have served as a forerunner for Erich Mendelsohn’s architectural solution. Through this line of inquiry, the paper broadens our understanding of this structure, by confronting the perpetuated notion of innovation with previous discourses from within and without architectural history. Some notes on the current state will illustrate the tensions between the city and the owner, and the listed building and its future use.
Tim Altenhof is an architect and a university assistant in architectural theory at the University of Innsbruck. He holds a PhD from Yale University, where his dissertation, entitled Breathing Space. The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings, was awarded the Theron Rockwell Field Prize in 2018. An excerpt of this work on Erich Mendelsohn’s hat factory at Luckenwalde won the Bruno Zevi Prize 2018. During the fall semester 2022, Tim is an International Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen, where he finishes his book manuscript, a monograph on the ways in which different conceptions of the atmosphere and a heightened awareness for breathing affected modern architecture in the early twentieth century.