Bet Tahara

Kornelia Kurowska


Erich Mendelsohn’s first building was preserved in his home town: he designed the cemetery hall in Allenstein (now Olsztyn, Poland) while still studying at the Technical University of Munich between 1911 and 1913. The traditional one-storey building with a red hipped roof, inconspicuous from the outside, housed a unique interior in which the young project engineer realised the ritual function of the building with a unique architectural imagination.

The Bet Tahara served the local Jewish community until the Second World War. After 1945, the building was nationalised and adapted to a new function – after reconstruction, it served as the file storage for the municipal archive. After 2005, the historic building was taken over by the “Borussia” Foundation, a Polish civil society organisation. A lengthy process of restoration but also of rediscovering Erich Mendelsohn in his home town followed. During the careful restoration carried out by Borussia, many original elements like that of the pyramid-shaped construction of the central hall or features of the original interior design of the old Bet Tahara were discovered.

Exactly 100 years after its construction, the building was completely restored and ceremoniously opened: named Mendelsohn House today, it is used for cultural and educational purposes – as a place of encounter, remembrance and dialogue, entirely in the spirit of the architect.


Kornelia Kurowska
– works as a cultural manager with a focus on international and transnational exchange, cultural politics, and civic education. Her academic studies comprised German studies and Human Resource Management, and she plans, manages and implements outstanding international cultural and educational projects. Kornelia Kurowska is the chairwoman of the Borussia Foundation, a Polish NGO that saved the Bet Tahara, Erich Mendelsohn’s first building in his hometown of Allenstein (now Olsztyn, Poland). In the restored building, now a center for intercultural dialogue, “Borussia” organises local and international projects and events dedicated, among other things, to the life and work of the architect.  

Erich Mendelsohn’s Buildings in Danger

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.