Session 4. Architecture of Industry & Living – Erich Mendelsohn

Electric Mendelsohn, Giving Architectural Form to Electricity

Achim Reese

A prominent feature of Erich Mendelsohn’s work is the integration of electric lighting into his architecture. Less attention has been paid to Mendelsohn’s particular focus on the architecture of power plants. Apart from presenting them in his publications, Mendelsohn designed several power plants electricity himself. Furthermore, he highlighted electricity generation in the production facilities he planned: Prominently positioned in the main axis of the hat factory in Luckenwalde, the power plant of the Leningrad textile factory occupies a prominent position on the street corner. Not alone an expression of modernity, Mendelsohn also showed great interest in the Atlantropa infrastructure project. If the architect thus assumed that a common power supply could connect different countries and thus obtain a peacemaking function, it must finally also be asked whether Mendelsohn’s relationship to electricity is even spiritually grounded.

Achim Reese studied architecture at RWTH Aachen und the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Working as editorial staff of the Berlin-based architecture journal ARCH+ from 2012 to 2015, he begun his dissertation Places for the Self. The Architecture of Charles W. Moore and its Socio-political Aspirations as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy, in 2016. Completing the thesis in 2021, Achim Reese is now working as an editor in Berlin. Moreover, he is teaching architectural history and theory at the Technical University in Munich.

Mendelsohn and the New Design for Living: Personal Privacy and Changing Community

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.

The Factory-as-Chimney

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.