Erich Mendelsohn. Functionalism is a question of religion?

Aiming 6 (1966).
Erich Mendelsohn in 1923 wrote to his wife: "It is only in the building. He had
to Reitenstein Ulm in a "Gasthaus" visited: "It is already three hundred
years. Without Bauhaus, no function or dynamics. It is only in the building! ".
At that time, Mendelssohn thirty-six years. His name was better known than
now. In 1921 his Einstein Tower in Potsdam regarded as a revolutionary
building. He had a hat factory in Luckenwalde and a textile factory Wüstegiersdorf
completed, he was first shocked and then Berlin, won by a few villas and especially
his renovation of the offices of the Berliner Tageblatt. He walked with an invitation
in his pocket to Palestine in great irrigation works to help. In 1923 his office was
well on its way to one of the largest in Europe.
At such time, the spontaneous response in which he is the quintessence of his
experience summarizes significant. He opposes the "literary additions' in
architecture. German architect concerned in those years, both the fantasies of the
Taut brothers, the Luckhardts, Scharoun, Hablik, Krayl and Finsterlin as the abstract
idealism of the Bauhaus aimed at a programmatic architecture. Against he comes
into opposition. He is theorizing, only to deliberate and architecture poor lead,
tired. Whether his views on a dynamic functionality or rationalistic fanaticism of the
Bauhaus is: it comes only to the building. In one of his earlier letters (1) he had
already realized that "ultimately, only action counts" and would never deny him this
insight. In his book Russia-Europe-America (1929) he says on his own emphatic
tone: "Only the active hand, the active mind is entitled to life. Symbol of the
machinery of the aircraft, the nuclear fission. God lives only in the act, not faith, not
reflection. And he adds to this: "Only art creates reality."
Mendelsohn was building for art and act simultaneously. Often means
"building"-are nothing more than busy with something. It is a verb which are
undetermined significance should be given to its object. Mendelsohn, however, bears
the word for building the object in itself. He built no towers,
[P. 52]
factories, warehouses, cinemas, hospitals, homes or synagogues. He built. The
subject was secondary to him. This was precisely by building his own content. He
expressed succinctly in which he wrote that he and all things "instead of snail shells
saw temples.
Building owned in his view, no subject. When he defended his plans -
halsstarriger than anyone else - then he felt driven by a higher, mysterious power,
which he sometimes natural, sometimes called life. In the artist builds the nature,
life, himself. The relativity of the individual destiny is a leitmotif, his whole life, in
all his writings back. In 1913 he noted: "Only the simple can be collectively
understood, the individual will ultimately meaningless. And on the eve of World
War II (1938) sees the world stage "as the result of a drama in which God and Devil,
Light and Darkness, Life and Death of our actions." His Jewish fatalism here will be
no stranger to his.
His social behavior is determined by that subjection to a law of nature, which
also fatalistic - the violence and power is unavoidable - and optimistic: by the right
side to stand kàn, so must the individual against the mass lascivious to contribute to
a more humane world. He scoffed at the "mindless invention of modern
civilization. Left for him only the withdrawal of a "house full of light and happiness,
rich and quiet ', where he can free of contamination and to defend themselves against
anything he exiting. To Dr.Freundlich, Einstein's assistant who took the initiative of
the Potsdam Observatory, he writes: "You say that my work is not taking into
account the capacity of my fellow ... My sketches are facts, outlines of a sudden
vision.In their architectural nature, they appear immediately as a whole and they
were also very preserved. Substantial remains of birth: it bears all the germs in it,
only in the development one can recognize the graceful humanity. And elsewhere he
gives for the following reason: "Everything is art, can only seed." "I feel more and
more how I create all accessories and not a reality lying beyond me." "What the
artist is simultaneously controlled ... The ruling in him. So he forces the world shape
the world. "
This high opinion of artistry, which can not be called otherwise than religious,
in addition to Mendelsohn's architecture involves all other art forms. All of them are
on the way to a new, universal entity, the biggest challenge - the shrine of a new
world - just like the smallest task - Everyday house - would include. "Only a new
will, the future is in the chaotic unconsciousness of his sail, the originality of its
universal totality. That will is located in the artist its way.
[P. 53]
The reason why Mendelsohn among all the arts the most difficult, most extrinsic
factual designated art chosen, can only lie in the fact that he is the rhythm of nature
as experienced spatially. Even the music he saw as a spatial body. Bach's form is his
"architectural planning '. In the biography of her husband tells a telling factoid
Louise Mendelsohn. Blocks at the front he made to his daughter play and participate
in the manual he wrote: "I would be grateful if the child learns to experience the
space. With these blocks can they learn from childhood to order over chaos and
spatial conception than linear.
His career as an architect, he is not a job started, but with architectural
fantasies, dreams that night in the long war on the Russian front in quick and precise
sketches were deposited. His thinking process, which intuitively vaslegt the overall
shape, is in complete typed. The first sketch is usually so perfectly with the final
building was that it could be made afterwards. His wife writes: "After a meticulous
study of the situation of the site took an unexpected Mendelsohn small sketch book
from his pocket and drew in a continuous line of the building, as he is, three
dimensional, imagined. He called this the "first draft". In the course of the
investigation of all possible solutions, he then tried to take away, but he always came
back to his original concept. It was for me a mysterious experience to see how the
"first draft" all contained the entire building, inside and outside ". Many of these
designs were never realized. Some, however, show a striking resemblance to recent
constructions of others. That does not mean that they Mendelsohn inspired, but they
show what a pure intuition, he had the potential of new technologies and for him not
to develop a fantasy, but arrived at the building.
These sketches he has the best part of his fame is due. At the end of his life he
called them yet, "the key to all that follows. In 1919 he put them on display at Paul
Cassirer in Berlin under the title architecture in Eisen und Beton. This title was as
deliberate as the sketches. Mendelsohn is believed that the materials glass, steel and
concrete are inherent to the renewal of architecture contributed. They determined the
new vision, but the other could only be discovered at the time they were needed for
its development.As in 1953, the year of his death, his career overschouwt, he points
to emphasize the role of the material in the new architecture. After De
Stijl andBauhaus have been responsible for the unilateral glorification of reason and
intellect and in return after the spontaneously recognized truth of the organic in
nature to the contractor, he concludes: "The old system of columns and beams and
the medieval system of piers and vaults - both inelastic,
[P. 54]
rigid constructions in stone - by people have devised forms and structures as a
result. The static principle of contrast, the elastic unit is derived directly from nature.
" Only the elasticity of the reinforced concrete internal dynamics is possible in a
static form: 'Dynamics ie internal events of a stationary, stable body space (such as
the dynamic stability of the blood in the body). Many of the sketches make industrial
sites, stations, warehouses, market halls, airports, movie studios - sometimes a block
- for. Mendelsohn believed in the machine. "So far she is the willing accomplice of a
deadly exploitation been. Now she is a constructive element of a new living
organism ... it arises as a necessary gift of evolution itself at the time that the need
for it arises ... It is both transcendent symbol of the decay as an element of a new
ordering of life itself. Since the development of her powers we seemingly tame
nature. In truth, we need them only with new resources.The sketches, however,
reveal something more than faith in the machine.They show that Mendelsohn does
not think the individual, but to the general structure of a new age in which the life
would take shape. He wanted to create monuments for the new age, "especially if the
machine is easy 'and as dynamic," temples of the cathedrals of industry and
trade. Tessenow exertions for small, dignified individual homes, he ranked on a par
with impressionism and aestheticism, including what he called "humanitarian device
for disabled lives.
With his conception of the artist as 'revolutionary of Mind', his dream of a
universal socialist brotherhood, his belief in an ever-more-war-future, it is not
difficult Mendelsohn a niche in the German expressionism of the twenties . He can
situate alongside Gropius fraternally with its cathedral of socialism. He was not a
mere exponent of his time, but a lucid medium, in many respects more consistent
than the theorists of functionalism. His expressionism can not be reduced to a
limited historical situation. On the contrary, an overall vision of the role of
architecture in the future. Even those who are high-sounding phrases and prophetic
not accept the same common aim: to give the organization a monumental modern
society, the individual symbols up for a transcendent law of life.
The names of the influences he has undergone Mendelsohn ourselves doing
fine. When he was in the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne post reviews, he
only has one word of praise for the theater of van de Velde. This was the only one
looking shape. Some sketches van de Velde (the theater of the Champs-Elysees in
Paris, the
[P. 55]
Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, or the Left in Antwerp) show the relationship of
both to see spirits. However, this exemplified the ten propositions which van de
Velde formulated against Muthesius: these fervent defense of the creative originality
against the "Typisierung" Mendelsohn was able to sign them. The real 'form-fathers
"of contemporary life for him, however, Wright and Olbrich. Nikolaus Pevsner has
pointed to the link that can be made between a drawing of Olbrich of 1898 and some
early sketches of Mendelsohn. But it was the bold achievements of Max
Berg's Jahrhunderthalle in Breslau (1913) - the remarkable concrete structure from
those days - and Peter Behrens' AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin (1909) by
Mendelssohn to the concrete possibilities of van de Velde and Olbrich form fantasies
revealed. Though he initially nothing more than sketches, he believed that one day
she would come by him or another could be achieved.The Einstein Tower, this
happened almost literally. In one of his letters regrets Mendelsohn, hand and eye is
not a mechanical connection, so that the hand is the vision of the "closed eye"
captures. When building the tower would he first experienced the gap that lies
between the sketch and realization. For whatever reason, his tower was not set in
stone, but brick.The concrete structure as a homogeneous form, however, was
thought to faithfully mimic, which Mendelsohn confirmed once and for all that he
built for the creation of a symbol and this symbol character prevailed over rational
construction material or authenticity. That this symbol shape in addition be of
practical use was found, it could only substantiate the belief that his intuition, "the
optical vision, totally primarily on technical analysis.One can reject the premises of
this argument, dispute the validity of the method, but the expressive power of the
building can not be disregarded.Building is perhaps not the right word. The reality
surpasses the content that that word evokes. Rather it is an architectural monument,
like a Greek temple, for example. In contrast, however, expresses not a static balance
of bright proportioned units, but the emotion of a dynamic articulated whole, "a
telluric and planetary 'rhythm.
The other buildings of the first period (1919 - 1921) are far removed from the
Einstein Tower and sketches. This does not, as one pleased, claiming that there was
a fracture. Especially against the background of the later work may be the real scope
of the first measure and the utopian, academic cumbersome and of seeing that was
hidden at first sight. The factory Luckenwalde there are fragments of an impressive
plasticity and monumentality, such as the drying tower, but the attempt by a
decorative treatment of the walls throughout the com-
[P. 56]
in a complex rhythm fluctuations is no longer convincing. The academic plan of the
Einstein Tower was partly in the power of form, however, occurs in Luckenwalde
the formalist, symmetrical structure of the whole disturbing in the foreground. When
the tower came the question of sincerity is not constructive. In the factory we are
confronted in every detail, so much so that if we do not sincerity as a postulate of
contemporary architecture had discovered them here as we set a clear demand would
find. In the tower, they noticed the stereotype of the little design on, the factory hit
between the eyes.
 In its own borders, the plant also visible from the tower. Those limits are not in
the plane of realization alone. They are not only due to Mendelsohn perhaps
youthful awkwardness. In both cases, in fact, he himself as a builder who mastered
his medium. I think they really inherent in the vision he once negative, but concisely
summed up in the exclamation: "Constructivists poor!". Against Constructivism
Mendelsohn suggests not the spontaneous, organic shape, "free and true as the
flowers, face of the structure and tectonic necessity" - although those words from
him - but an abstract formal desire, an autonomous rhythm that formal and often
formalistic composition laws answers that imposes its rule to function, structure and
materials. Here is Mendelsohn expressionism, which he also organic expression, and
in fact a complete negation of the organic architecture in the real sense, as for
example - to him with a contemporary comparison - is incarnate in the Gut Garkau
Hugo Häring. That leaves the form itself, as in nature, the real life. He can absorb
and process all impulses. Mendelsohn however, explained the reality of life in the
individual, concrete, but in a supra-personal, abstract and sacred value. That he is in
a great tradition stood EMBODIED only skimmed.
The Einstein Tower and plant Luckenwalde it has been regarded as a kind of
youthful sins, which Mendelsohn was soon repented. Through the power of one,
clear, new spatial image - the monument - they drop, they mean the entire body of
work certainly something special. But the later work there is no break
them. Mendelsohn himself would say: it integrates a balanced way, the only feature
in the dynamics of the form. In all the works from the years 1922-1923 (two-family
house in Charlottenburg, Rudolf Mosse-house, Weichmann warehouse, factory-
Meyer to Wüstegiersdorf Kaufmann, villas Sternefeld) has the same architecture can
be recognized: the clear unity of the building, which is not analytical or
compositional composed, but a moving mass. The over-
[P. 57]
corridors from the inside remain heavily emphasized as an important event.How
strong linear element in the expression of the dynamics involved are not only "strong
lines" such as (by Mendelssohn) for van de Velde, but the inner force that emotion
of the whole mass transfer. Because of its subject matter deliberately built
architecture Mendelsohn finally put itself in this very building against the avant-
garde architecture of that day. I am thinking of the Schroder House by Rietveld
(1923), or the Villa La Roche by Le Corbusier (1923), which as intangible as
possible coordinates of planes and lines in one continuous space a habitable place
more identifying than define, let out, like Mendelsohn, isolation and making center.
From 1926 until about 1930, a second time with great creative projects: the
Schockenmagazijnen, the Metallarbeitergewerbschaft, Woga the complex with the
Universum Cinema, Columbus House and the house on the Rupenhorn in
Berlin. Moments earlier (1924) is a trip to America on a bright Mendelsohn
impression left behind. In letters, photographs and an unconventional diary shows he
was an astute observer. He sees in America the changing dimensions of the life
energy "has been achieved in" Things Anfang ', anonymous buildings whose beauty
he admires technical. His enthusiasm makes him not blind to the fact that the
'individual financial powers, which in a totally undemocratic manner, their twenty to
fifty storey individualities have established. " The greatest experience remains the
'historic' meeting with Wright. Through Neutra, who was in Berlin in Mendelsohn
studio and now worked at Wright, he was received Taliesin. "We immediately
understood each other as brothers." Yet it is not the influence of Wright's work shine
through the second period, but that of Sullivan. Over the Larkin Building by Wright,
the Carson, Pirie Scott & Building and the Van Allen store in Sullivan considered as
forerunners of the series department stores and office buildings Mendelsohn
accelerates in its heyday. They continue to stand by the powerful summary of the
whole building into a dynamic movement. This is now emphasized contrapuntal. If it
were symbolic, they are in our illustrations summarized in the curve of the staircase
of the Metallarbeitergewerbschaft and the interior of the cinema universe. The
movement was never move alone. It was flowing through a static, individualized
mass, the momentum of a monumental body. The long horizontal window bands,
who prefers a curved surface rhythm, be offset by marked, clear, often bright
projecting stairwells of the building completion.
In the Columbus House on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, during the ear-
[P. 58]
log was destroyed, saw Mendelsohn on all rhetorical insistence. Just because it
seems so little mendelsohniaans, yet it lends itself best to the question of the
architecture of today and tomorrow to be pure and universal.Mendelsohn is proved
here as Benevolo observes, that some functional problems just by a new architecture
to solve, ie that its architecture is no alternative to functionalism, but a specific
interpretation. Perfect functionality can coincide with a more than functional
conception of architecture. He did not only give expression to the function, but, as
Gottfried Semper already formulated, including the psychological contents of the
building. It is not just an Mendelsohn 'Zweckform' but also an "Art Form". These
two should be kept to an absolute unify.
In his own house on the Rupenhorn Berlin (1930) Mendelsohn denies his views
are not. But here's the contact with their own daily life experience of a delicate
epicurean so intimate, here is the grandeur of the building so directly tailored to the
individual human person, that the will of symbol creation involuntarily little
evaporation and the high architectural ideas a little dubious to be. He must have felt
himself "surrounded by a world war in which millions to a roar which they
themselves will fall victim, we build a house whose modesty is small enough to not
be co-guilty." It was a game of fate that a few years later, the Gestapo torture
chambers would decorate it in the Columbus House.
Not long Mendelsohn has lived in his expensive home. In 1933 he left Germany
for good. The first stage of the years of wandering - "the eternal jew has a right
nowhere right at home '- is about Amsterdam. There he along with Wide Field and
Ozenfant a previous project for an international art again, but again without
success. From Amsterdam, he went to England, where he, in collaboration with
Serge Chermayeff at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill and builds some remarkable
properties, in the spirit of his own home on the Rupenhorn.
His main field of activity, however, Palestine. There he develops - in a new
climate, under another sun - a new but equally strong-characterized form for his
architectural conception. In the bright light close to the building mass, to put even
brighter affirming. The transition from outside to inside is even more dramatic in the
repetition of many, sharply cut, small window holes. An example of this (and also
the persistence of the curve) is the hospital of Haifa.
After so many other German architects draw Mendelsohn in 1941 to
America. He was warmly welcomed. He had time to think, write and lecture.But the
work was stopped. Only in 1945, he in San Francisco
[P. 59]
a new association. But as before, this does not last long. He worked too personal and
was merciless to his employees. He must once have proclaimed: "Here is just a
designer, and Erich Mendelsohn. On a note that after his death took place, said:
"When God created the world, he had no helpers. Why would I need? " In a
disillusioned letter shortly before his death he wrote that "ninety-five percent of my
colleagues are completely wrong architects call '.
His American period is characterized by Synagogues: St. Louis, Cleveland, St.
Paul, Grand Rapids. However diverse they may be, each of them remain the basic
lines of vision to recognize Mendelsohn. They are the culmination of its normal
evolution. He had indeed, as he himself said, in all his work to create something
eternal: a new design for a new religious religious affiliation.
This religious vision of architecture as a visualization of the final meaning of
human existence is opposed by the functional building that is directly and simply to
the practical needs of the individual tunes.Mendelsohn saw in this contrast naturally
no dilemma, since it is precisely the religious organization of the global system as
the actual need of the man regarded. And I think he saw it clearer than many
functionalists. The problem is not: religious or nonreligious, but: which religion and
which format? The question which the work of our Mendelsohn argues, these words:
functional architecture one can answer the religious question of man, or only an
autonomous and monumental architecture that form?
Mendelsohn found arguments for its position in the immature nature of
functionalism. Even radical functionalists, such as a Gropius, or convinced
constructivists, such as Mies van der Rohe, involuntarily looked at self-construction
forms themselves as great symbols of a supernatural order could act. Aversion to
functionalism, which since 1945 gradually explicitly in the day came, Mendelsohn
recognized a breakthrough ideas. In particular he mentioned work of Wright, Nervi,
Torroja, Candela, Niemeyer, "concluded that the elastic nature of his early sketches
showed. Whether this is so and whether they took the latest trends in architecture
represent, we show in the middle. The question remains whether the architects of
today is indeed consistent with Mendelsohn views.
They do so in that Mendelsohn has always been opposed to the ratio as the sole
source of creativity. They do so to the extent Mendelsohn rejects all general
formulas and the act of building primary states. They are consistent with its opinion
on Mies van der Rohe: "He has his formula and considered seems to continue until
the end. Square and academic, a canon of
[P. 60]
details, a rigid system of principles, the new hope of a free humanity will kill quickly
and painlessly ... Prussian rigor without the charm of Schinkel, a clear sky without
sun and as dead as Julius Caesar "(1950). They are also a good deal with his views
on the materiality of building and finally they believe, with him into the real reality
and absolute necessity of the form as a meaningful expression of earthly existence.
On the nature of that form to their ideas are outlined. Mendelsohn sees the form
as an expression of religious-sacral system, however vague it may be. Each building
has a "deed in nostalgia converted 'to a new, universal sacredness, to which
humanity can target. Not for nothing called Mendelsohn buildings are temples and
cathedrals. For him is what he said about Wright: "The destinations of the orders he
received were not big enough for the space game he developed. This is blatantly
manifested in warehouses Mendelsohn, where he "cathedrals of commerce" wanted
to make. Such a concept has meaning only in a faith-based ordered community,
which can play an essential organizing principle (or finally god general man). But
Mendelsohn could make nothing of its warehouses than 'individualities of the money
hungry. " Also the buildings for the administration of a city or a country which no
longer representative of a higher authority or to an absolute ideal citizen, one can not
make cathedrals.The normal outlet for the religious needs of course the
church. Mendelsohn saw the highest chance to realize his ideal in his synagogue. But
this coincidence of purpose and form in a traditional church building is considered
sacred inauthentic form most clearly demonstrated. The denominational church
building has long since been universally sacred role played center in the community.
One can also reverse this reasoning. Based on the observation that modern
creators like Mendelsohn, a kind of sacredness continue to posit, one can create its
necessity decisions and then, as Walter Bunsmann in Die Welt (December 4, 1965),
to the crazy conclusion (which more current reality puts then one would expect) that
Christians should anyway continue to build cathedrals. In this way it is evidence -
and they all know this yet - the highest service to one of sacredness frustrated
community.
In one of his letters, in which he recounts a conversation with Wright,
Mendelsohn puts us on track to form an alternative solution to illustrate this idea. In
a discussion on architecture and religion, "Wright said that" the architecture of the
future for the first time in history will be pure architecture, space itself, with no
schedule, no phrase, movement,
[P. 61]
three-and four-dimensional ". En de reden hiervan is: 'Het dualisme tussen God en
mens verdwijnt. De mens is god zélf. Er bestaat slechts één schepper, zoals er slechts
één architectuur, slechts één ruimte kan zijn'. De kern van de mens of de architectuur
wordt niet meer naar buiten verlegd. Architectuur wordt directe beleving en
uitdrukking van de immanentie van de menselijke persoon. Alles in haar wordt
dienstbaar aan de concrete werkelijkheid, het echte fundament van de nieuwe religie.
This service is the core of the functionality of modern architecture. She wants
her homes, hospitals, town halls, banks, churches, warehouses, not any monuments,
temples and cathedrals for an unknown or no longer know God, but to fully match
the scale in community living human individual, which they its form and freedom as
possible to encourage spontaneous self.She wants half ie, humanized, create nature
in which each person has his own life in the greatest possible freedom to build. It
spans the daily nature of the human no longer sacred one peak to another, but
elevates the everyday nature of sacredness itself. If this ever becomes reality, then,
as Henry Miller says somewhere, the cities of the world disappear and the world will
be a big city, she faces the interiority of the individual self □
(1) The references in this text are, in a single post, from Erich
Mendelsohn, Briefe eines Architekten, Prestel Verlag, 1961.
Glory and misery of architectural criticism.
Striving 7 (1966).

Show up. Part 2: Dissolve in space 1966-1970

Author: Geert Bekaert

Source: Geert Bekaert, Collected draw. Part 2: Dissolve in space 1966-1970.Monuments and
Landscape Foundation, zp [Brussels] 1986

DBNL.org