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47-519: The building was designed by Ernst Schöffler, Carlo Schlönbach and Carl Jacobi, in New Objectivity style, featuring a "light tower" of height 30 metres (98 ft), and a large foyer in Art Deco style. It was a cinema and a theatre; it seated 1,924, and an orchestra of up to 60 musicians could be accommodated. There was a café seating 350. It opened on 26 January 1928; the first film shown was

94-493: A close parallel to the Bauhaus, Vkhutemas , and there had been significant cultural connection through the cross-fertilization of El Lissitzky . Russia had colossal plans for entire cities of worker housing, and an eye on acquiring German expertise. Ernst May, Stam, and Schütte-Lihotzky moved there in 1930 to design New Towns like Magnitogorsk , with Hannes Meyer's so-called 'Bauhaus Brigade' and Bruno Taut soon to follow. But

141-648: A disastrous effect on the New Building, because of Germany's financial dependence on the USA. Many estates and projects planned in Frankfurt and Berlin were postponed indefinitely, while the architectural profession became politically polarised, something symbolised by the sacking in 1930 of the Marxist Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer—who had stressed, with his collaborators Ludwig Hilberseimer and Mart Stam ,

188-457: A dyeing hall. The dyeing hall became a distinctive feature of the factory, the building was shaped with a modern ventilation hood that expelled the toxic fumes used in the dyeing process. The structure even ironically resembled a hat. As early as 1924, Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst (a series of monthly magazines on architecture) produced a booklet about his work. In that same year, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius , he

235-527: A more individual and humane version of the 'existence minimum' residential housing formula. But the political mood turned uglier through that time, with open hostile press, and direct pressure on Jewish and/or Social Democratic architects to leave the country. Many prominent German modernists went to the Soviet Union . Since 1920, Moscow had been the site of the Russian state-run art and technical school,

282-500: A similar manner in the 1910s, using glass surfaces and severe geometric compositions. Examples of this include Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer 's 1911 Fagus Factory or Hans Poelzig 's 1912 department store in Breslau ( Wrocław ). However, in the aftermath of the war these architects (as well as others such as Bruno Taut ) worked in the revolutionary Arbeitsrat für Kunst , pioneering Expressionist architecture , particularly through

329-527: Is about Erich Mendelsohn and his wife, in which Dror animates the memoirs of Louise and the letters. At the end of 1918, on his return from World War I , he settled his practice in Berlin. The Einsteinturm and the hat factory in Luckenwalde established his reputation. The Hat Factory was commissioned in 1921, Mendelsohn's design included four production halls, a boiler, a turbine house, two gatehouses and

376-570: The CIAM had formed, and its earliest conferences, dedicated to questions of Existenzminimum were dominated by the social programmes of German architects. A leftist, technologically oriented wing of the movement had formed in Switzerland and the Netherlands, the so-called ABC Group. It was made up of collaborators of El Lissitzky such as Mart Stam and Hannes Meyer , whose greatest work

423-671: The Einsteinturm (" Einstein Tower "). This relationship and also the family friendship with the Luckenwalde hat manufacturers Salomon and Gustav Herrmann helped Mendelsohn to an early success. From then until 1918, what is known of Mendelsohn is, above all, a multiplicity of sketches of factories and other large buildings, often in small format or in letters from the front to his wife, Louise Mendelsohn (née Maas; 1895–1980). The 2011 documentary film by Duki Dror titled "Incessant Visions"

470-735: The Frankfurt kitchen ) and Mart Stam . The immediate effect of May's work can be seen in Gropius's 1926 Siedlung Dessau-Törten in Dessau (built around the same time as the more famous Bauhaus building ), which also pioneered prefabrication technology. That Germany had become the centre of the New Building – as it was called, in preference to 'the New Architecture' – was confirmed by the Werkbund's Weissenhof Estate of 1927, where despite

517-606: The Gliwice Weichsmann factory, both 1921–2. Perhaps the earliest examples of the 'New Building' in Germany were at the 1922 Bauhaus exhibition, Georg Muche 's Haus am Horn , and in the same year, Gropius/Meyer's design for Chicago's Tribune Tower competition. However, the fullest early exploration of a new, non-expressionist avant-garde idiom was in the 1923–24 'Italienischer Garten' in Celle by Otto Haesler . This

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564-626: The Harvard Graduate School of Design . More popularly, in the United States, the publication of Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock 's groundbreaking International Style MOMA exhibition and book of 1932 established an official "canon" of the style, with an emphasis on Mies, Gropius, and Le Corbusier. Attention to these three came as the expense of the Social Democratic context of Neues Bauen , and

611-539: The cellist Luise Maas. Between 1910 and 1953, they corresponded with each other; these materials provide insight into the lives of an artist and couple who experienced a changing international landscape, including their fleeing from the Third Reich in Germany in 1933. Through his wife, he met the cello-playing astrophysicist Erwin Finlay Freundlich . Freundlich was the brother of Herbert Freundlich ,

658-605: The 1920s and 30s. It is also frequently called Neues Bauen ( New Building ). The New Objectivity remodeled many German cities in this period. The earliest examples of the style date to before the First World War, under the auspices of the Deutscher Werkbund 's attempt to provide a modern face for Germany. Many of the architects who would become associated with the New Objectivity were practicing in

705-540: The 1950s) and in the Schocken Department Stores , in Stuttgart (demolished in the 1960s) Chemnitz and Wrocław . In Munich Robert Vorhoelzer and Robert Poeverlein founded the "Bayerische Postbauschule" and built many modernist post offices while the architectural mainstream of 1920s and 1930s Munich still preferred the nostalgic "Heimatstil". The Great Depression , beginning in 1929, had

752-734: The Polish city of Olsztyn . His birthplace was at the former Oberstrasse 21, now no. 10 Staromiejska street. A plaque embedded on the wall on the side of Barbara street commemorates his place of birth. He was not related to the Mendelssohn family . He was the fifth of six children; his mother was Emma Esther (née Jaruslawsky), a hatmaker and his father David was a shopkeeper. He attended a humanist Gymnasium in Allenstein and continued with commercial training in Berlin . In 1906, he took up

799-655: The Russian experiment was over almost before it started. Working conditions proved hopeless, supplies impossible to get, and the labor unskilled and uninterested. Stalin's acceptance of the "retrograde" Palace of Soviets entry in the February 1932 competition provoked a strong reaction from the international modernist community, particularly Le Corbusier . The modernists had just lost their biggest client. Internal Russian politics led to vicious in-fighting among Russian architects' unions, and an equally vicious campaign against foreign 'specialists'. Some designers did not survive

846-613: The Titania on 26 May 1945, and in December 1948 the founding ceremony of the Free University of Berlin took place. Performers appearing at the Titania included Josephine Baker (in 1950), Marlene Dietrich (in 1960), Louis Armstrong , Maurice Chevalier and Yehudi Menuhin . It closed as a cinema in December 1965. From 1966 it was no longer an entertainment venue, parts of the building being leased by retail shops. In 1995,

893-538: The United States and taught at the University of California, Berkeley . Until the end of World War II his activities were limited by his immigration status to lectures and publications. However, he also served as an advisor to the U.S. government. For instance, in 1943 he collaborated with the U.S. Army and Standard Oil in order to build " German Village ", a set of replicas of typical German working-class housing estates, which would be of key importance in acquiring

940-562: The architectural logic of state-sponsored mass-produced dwellings. Johnson and Hitchcock derided 'fanatical functionalists' like Hannes Meyer for building for "some proletarian superman of the future". Although stripped of its social meaning and intellectual rigor on import to the USA, the New Objectivity would nevertheless be enormously influential on the postwar development of Modern architecture worldwide. Characterization of New Objectivity as an architectural style to begin with would have provoked strong disagreement from its practitioners. In

987-683: The deputy director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie (now the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in the Dahlem district of Berlin). Freundlich wished to build a suitable astronomical observatory to experimentally confirm Einstein 's Theory of Relativity . Through his relationship with Freundlich, Mendelsohn had the opportunity to design and build

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1034-649: The experience. Others would leave Germany for Japan, or for the sizable German-exile community in Istanbul. Major architects in the modernist community ended up as far afield as Kenya, Mexico, and Sweden. Others left for the Isokon Project and other projects in England, then eventually to the United States, where Gropius, Breuer and Berlin city planner Martin Wagner would educate a generation of students at

1081-573: The family occupied two years later. With an expensive publication about his new home, illustrated by Amédée Ozenfant among others, Mendelsohn became the subject of envy. In the spring of 1933, in the wake of growing antisemitism and the rise of the Nazis in Germany, he fled to England. His assets were seized by the Nazis , his name struck from the list of the German Architects' Union, and he

1128-539: The former Expressionists Bruno Taut and Hugo Häring on colourful developments of flats and terraced houses such as the 1925 Horseshoe Estate , the 1926 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (Onkel-Toms-Hütte) and the 1929 'Carl-Legien-Siedlung', through the auspices of the Trade Unionist building society GEHAG . Taut's designs featured controversially modern flat roofs, humane access to sun, air and gardens, and generous amenities like gas, electric light, and bathrooms. Critics on

1175-648: The housing architects was Bruno Taut . The major expansion of this came with the appointment of Ernst May to the position of city architect and planner by the Social Democratic administration of Frankfurt-am-Main . May was trained by the British garden city planner Raymond Unwin , and his Siedlungen showed garden city influence in their use of open space: they totally repudiated the nostalgic style of Unwin's projects such as Hampstead Garden Suburb . May's 'New Frankfurt' would be enormously important for

1222-474: The importance of working class and collective housing—to be replaced by Mies van der Rohe, whose Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat House had gained him a reputation as a purveyor of luxury to the rich, and proceeded to turn the Bauhaus into a private school. Important work within Germany continued into the early 1930s, particularly the Ring's Siemensstadt Estate in Berlin, which was planned by Hans Scharoun as

1269-687: The interior was replaced, and it re-opened as the Cineplex Titania, with five screens and 505 seats; after later renovation there were seven screens and 1,223 seats. New Objectivity (architecture) The New Objectivity (a translation of the German Neue Sachlichkeit , sometimes also translated as New Sobriety ) is a name often given to the Modern architecture that emerged in Europe, primarily German-speaking Europe, in

1316-594: The new citizenship also allowed them to issue guarantees and thus bring other family members to Britain. In Mandatory Palestine, Mendelsohn built many now-famous buildings: Weizmann House and three laboratories at the Weizmann Institute of Science , Anglo-Palestine Bank in Jerusalem, Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus , Rambam Hospital in Haifa and others. From 1941 until his death, Mendelsohn lived in

1363-535: The new forms with more traditional masonry building was developed by Poelzig with his Haus des Rundfunks in Berlin and IG Farben Building in Frankfurt, and by Emil Fahrenkamp in his undulating Berlin Shell-Haus . Meanwhile, Erich Mendelsohn's architecture had developed into a 'dynamic functionalism' for commerce, seen in his curvaceous department stores such as the Columbus-Haus in Berlin (demolished in

1410-559: The new style. Elsewhere, Karl Schneider designed Estates in Hamburg , Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed low-cost houses in Berlin's Afrikanische Strasse (and in 1926, a monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht ) while straight-aligned, and to their critics, schematic Zeilenbau flats were built to the designs of Otto Haesler, Gropius and others in Dammerstock, Karlsruhe . The term Functionalism began to be used to denote

1457-474: The political Right complained that these developments were too opulent for 'simple people'. The progressive Berlin mayor Gustav Böss defended them: "We want to bring the lower levels of society higher." Similar experiments in municipal socialism such as the Viennese Gemeindebau were more stylistically eclectic , so Frankfurt and Berlin's authorities were taking a gamble on public approval of

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1504-491: The presence of Le Corbusier and JJP Oud , most of the architects were German speaking. Further Werkbund Estate-exhibitions were mounted in Wrocław and Vienna in subsequent years. The architects of the New Objectivity were eager to build as much cost-effective housing as possible, partly to address Germany's postwar housing crisis, and partly to fulfill the promise of Article 155 of the 1919 Weimar Constitution , which said that

1551-449: The rather severe, nothing superfluous ethos of the New Objectivity, being used as early as 1925 by Adolf Behne in his book Der Moderne Zweckbau ("The Modern Functional Building"). In 1926, practically all Modernist German architects organised themselves into a group known as Der Ring , which attracted criticism from soon to be- Nazi architects like Paul Schultze-Naumburg , who formed Der Block  [ de ] in response. In 1928

1598-850: The secret Glass Chain group. The early works of the Bauhaus , such as the Sommerfeld House, were in this vein. Expressionism's dynamism and use of glass (whether for transparency or colour effects) would be a mainstay of the New Objectivity. The turn from Expressionism towards the more familiarly Modernist styles of the mid-late 1920s came under the influence of the Dutch avant-garde, particularly De Stijl , whose architects such as Jan Wils and JJP Oud had adapted ideas derived from Frank Lloyd Wright into cubic social housing, inflected with what Theo van Doesburg called 'the machine aesthetic '. Also steering German architects away from Expressionism

1645-574: The silent film The Story of a Little Parisian , starring Carmen Boni . The first film with sound was The Singing Fool starring Al Jolson , shown on 29 October 1929, and the first German-speaking sound film, shown on 21 November 1929, was The Royal Box , starring Alexander Moissi . The building was not much damaged in the Second World War. The Berlin Philharmonic , conducted by Leo Borchard , gave its first postwar concert at

1692-535: The socialist experiments being made in the USSR , where he designed the Red Banner Textile Factory in 1926 (together with the senior architect of this project, Hyppolit Pretreaus ). His Mossehaus newspaper offices and Universum cinema were also highly influential on art deco and Streamline Moderne . In 1926, he bought an old villa, and in 1928, he designed Rupenhorn, nearly 4000 m , which

1739-688: The start of 1934 he began planning on Weizmann's behalf a series of projects in Mandatory Palestine during the British Mandate. In 1935, he opened an office in Jerusalem and planned Jerusalem stone buildings in the International Style that greatly influenced local architecture. In 1938, he dissolved his London office. At that same time he and his wife received British citizenship and he changed his name to "Eric";

1786-456: The state would "promote the object of assuring to every German a healthful habitation". This phrase drove the technical definition of Existenzminimum (subsistence dwelling) in terms of minimally-acceptable floorspace, density, fresh air, access to green space, access to transit, and other such resident issues. At the same time there was a massive expansion of the style across German cities. In Berlin, architect-planner Martin Wagner worked with

1833-957: The study of national economics at the University of Munich . In 1908, he began studying architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin ); two years later he transferred to the Technische Hochschule München , where in 1912 he graduated cum laude . In Munich he was influenced by Theodor Fischer , an architect whose own work fell between neo-classical and Jugendstil , and who had been teaching there since 1907; Mendelsohn also made contact with members of Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke , two groups of expressionist artists. From 1912 to 1914, he worked as an independent architect in Munich. In 1915, he married

1880-457: The subsequent development of the New Objectivity, not only because of its striking appearance but also in its success in quickly re-housing thousands of the city's poor. However, their advanced streamlining techniques often alienated the building profession, much of whom were made superfluous by the lack of ornament and speed of construction. May would also employ other architects in Frankfurt such as Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (where she developed

1927-597: The words of Gropius, they believed that buildings should be "shaped by internal laws without lies and games," and that the practice of building would transcend the use of ornament and any stylistic categorization. In German the phrase Neues Bauen , dating from a 1919 book by Erwin Gutkind , captures this idea, because Bauen connotes 'construction' as opposed to 'architecture'. Erich Mendelsohn Erich Mendelsohn ( German pronunciation: [ˈeːʁɪç ˈmɛndl̩ˌzoːn] ); 21 March 1887 – 15 September 1953)

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1974-520: Was a German-British architect, known for his expressionist architecture in the 1920s, as well as for developing a dynamic functionalism in his projects for department stores and cinemas. Mendelsohn was a pioneer of the Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architecture, notably with his 1921 Mossehaus design. Mendelsohn was born to a Jewish family in Allenstein , East Prussia , Germany , now

2021-619: Was excluded from the Prussian Academy of Arts . In England he formed an architectural practice with Serge Chermayeff , which continued until the end of 1936 and together they designed two important private houses – Cohen House and Shrubs Wood – and the De La Warr Pavilion , an entertainment and arts complex in the seaside town of Bexhill-on-Sea, commissioned and paid for by the local landowner. Mendelsohn had long known Chaim Weizmann , later President of Israel . At

2068-464: Was one of the founders of the progressive architectural group known as Der Ring . His practice employed as many as forty people, among them, as a trainee, Julius Posener , later an architectural historian. Mendelsohn's work encapsulated the consumerism of the Weimar Republic , most particularly in his shops: most famously the Schocken Department Stores . Nonetheless, he was also interested in

2115-460: Was the first Modernist Siedlung (literally "settlement", though "estate" would be more precise), an area of new-build social housing characterised by flat roofs, an irregular, asymmetrical plan, with houses arranged in south-facing terraces with generous windows and rendered surfaces. Contrary to the 'white box' idea later popularised by the International Style , these were frequently painted in bright colors. The strongest proponent of color among

2162-904: Was the glassy expanse of the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam . The clean lines of the New Objectivity were also being used for schools and public buildings, by May in Frankfurt, in Hannes Meyer 's ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau and Max Taut 's Alexander von Humboldt School in Berlin, as well as police administration and office buildings in Berlin under Martin Wagner. Cinemas, which would be very influential on Streamline Moderne picture palaces, were designed by Erich Mendelsohn (Kino-Universum, now Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz , Berlin, 1926) and Hans Poelzig ( Kino Babylon , Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse, Berlin, 1928–29) A composite style that used

2209-484: Was the influence of Constructivism , particularly of Vkhutemas and of El Lissitzky , who stayed in Berlin frequently during the early 1920s. Another element was the work in France of Le Corbusier , such as the proposals for the concrete 'Citrohan' house. In addition, Erich Mendelsohn had already been veering away from Expressionism towards more streamlined, dynamic forms, such as in his Mossehaus newspaper offices and

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