PLEASURE PAVILIONS
Erich Mendelsohn, 1920
Architecture as Sculpture
The architect Erich Mendelsohn was a pioneer Modernist. He was born in Allenstein, east Prussia (now Olszstyn, Poland) to Jewish parents. After training in Berlin and Munich, he began his architectural practice in Munich in 1918, and was soon successful. His Modernist designs for houses and factories showed a flair for handling materials such as steel and glass, and a very individual sense of form. Modernist buildings often looked like very plain rectilinear boxes of concrete or glass, but Mendelsohn’s had a strong sense of form and shape, sometimes curving at the corners, sometimes with prominent, horizontal lines running across the building. From early in his career, he had a sculptor’s touch.
Mendelsohn’s most famous building is his most sculptural. This is the Einstein Tower, housing laboratories and an observatory, at Potsdam. The structure looks as if it has been moulded out of pale concrete. A low, spreading base, all curves and sloping walls, supports a four-floor tower topped by a dome-shaped observatory. The tower’s walls curve – concave on one face, convex on another – and there is hardly a straight line to be seen. The tower’s style is sometimes called Expressionist. When Einstein himself saw it, he looked at it for a long time in silence, then summed it up in one word: ‘Organic’.
Mendelsohn never had the chance to complete such a sculptural building again. In the 1930s, he was forced to leave Germany, and he settled first in Britain then in the USA. He designed some fine buildings in these places but never anything as organic or Expressionist as the Einstein Tower. However, the notebooks he kept as a young man are full of drawings for sculptural concrete buildings, curving and twisting forms even more daring than the tower.
Some of these drawings are for skyscrapers; some for industrial buildings. One is a sketch called ‘project for a hall’ that looks like an early version of Sydney Opera House, fifty years before Jørn Utzon conceived it. A number of drawings are for unidentified structures inspired by the changing shapes of sand dunes that the architect observed on a visit to the Prussian coast. Another set are apparently inspired by pieces of music and have captions such as ‘Toccata in D major’ – these drawings feature repeated lines and curves that seem to be linked to recurring phrases or rhythms in music: Erich Mendelsohn referred to architecture as ‘formed rhythm’.
A lot of the drawings fall into the category of ‘fantasy architecture’. They were not meant to be built, but to act as ideas for more practical buildings. But a few come directly from one of Mendelsohn’s commissions. The architect’s family were friendly with the Herrmanns, who were hat manufacturers in Luckenwalde, in the state of Brandenberg, eastern Germany. In 1919, Gustav Herrmann asked Mendelsohn to design a small pavilion or summerhouse for his garden at Luckenwalde (a few years later, he also designed a new hat factory for the family). For the garden pavilion, the architect eventually produced an octagonal wooden structure.
However, before he came up with the finished design, Mendelsohn produced a series of much more interesting drafts, in ever more sculptural form. These drawings, known as either Pleasure Pavilions or Garden Pavilions, showed the way he was thinking. Some of the forms curve in repeated patterns like shells; some have ridged, domed roofs like spinning tops; others have organic forms like the Einstein Tower. They all look more like sculptures than buildings, and would really have been possible only in a plastic material such as concrete.
Mendelsohn was baffled by the source of his ‘inclination towards the fantastic’. Scholars have suggested that it might lie in the decorative style of the beginning of the twentieth century: Art Nouveau. This style drew on a vocabulary of curves, on sinuous lines and organic forms. The curvaceous forms of Paris Métro stations or the work of people such as Belgian designer Henri van de Velde are possible sources of inspiration. The pavilions also have a passing resemblance to the sculptural and curvaceous buildings of another great turn-of-the-century architect, the Catalan Antoni Gaudí (see Hotel Attraction entry here).
Mendelsohn understood that what he was exploring was something far from ordinary, and puzzled about what it was that made him design structures such as this. He writes: ’With me the everyday becomes something more than the everyday. I do not really know if it is because of my inclination towards the fantastic.’ But Mendelsohn goes on to say that his thinking is still firmly rooted in reality and the challenges of actually constructing buildings: ‘Problems of symmetry, and of the elasticity of the building components, and of the closed contour and of methods of construction concern me at every line and act as discipline, self-criticism and a universal rule.’
While making the drawings for the Pleasure Pavilions, Mendelsohn was also hard at work on the Einstein Tower – building at Potsdam started in 1921. He was constantly puzzling away at how to build this organic, Expressionist, little building in the materials available, becoming confident that steel and concrete would answer the challenge and allow a new kind of structure:
Steel in combination with concrete, reinforced concrete, is the building material for formal expression, for the new style... the relation between support and load, this apparently eternal law, will also have to alter its image, for things support themselves which formerly had to be supported... Towers mount and grow out of themselves with their own power and spirit and soul.
But using these materials was not always easy. The architect had to modify the structure of the Einstein Tower during construction because the steel and concrete would not support the shape he originally planned – only then could the tower ‘grow out of itself’ in the way he wanted. Perhaps, these difficulties were the reason why the inventive and Expressionist Pleasure Pavilions, striking and unique as they were, never got built. As time went on, Mendelsohn’s practice became busy with such practical and large-scale buildings as department stores, factories and houses. Thus, the architect had to devote his time to fresh challenges, and his adventurous designs for Gustav Herrmann stayed in his sketchbook.
