Erich Mendelsohn

Mendelsohn's genius applied not only to monumental standalone projects but also worked miracles in dense urban contexts. In late-1920s Berlin, he designed a series of revolutionary department stores and commercial buildings, the most classic being the Schocken department stores (1926–1930, with branches in Stuttgart, Chemnitz, and Nuremberg). The facades of these large retail buildings were sliced open by continuous, dynamically curving glass bands — by day reflecting street and sky, by night turning into luminous urban screens. The store was no longer a closed warehouse of goods but a transparent, inviting public place.

The Schocken Chemnitz branch (1930) pushed the aesthetic of the horizontal ribbon window to its extreme. The entire building looks like a beached ocean liner — a nearly hundred-meter-long horizontal line extends from one end of the street to the other, terminating at the corner in a vast curved glass tower. This was a rebuttal to the "functionalist" facade: modern commerce need not pretend to neutrality or objectivity — it can be forceful, confident, even showy. Mendelsohn proved that Expressionism is not a "sculptural style" irrelevant to the city but can directly participate in constructing the modern urban landscape.

But when the Nazis came to power in 1933, everything stopped abruptly. Mendelsohn was Jewish; his architecture was declared "degenerate" by the Third Reich. He spent his last night in Germany at a friend's house — from the window he could see the Columbushaus (1932, Potsdamer Platz) he had designed, a project already supplanted by Bauhaus before his eyes. The next day he left Germany, never to return. In exile, Mendelsohn designed numerous Jerusalem stone buildings in Palestine (including the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital), and later ended his career on the American West Coast designing synagogues — from Expressionism to regional modernism, his curves never ceased to flow.

Mendelsohn's exile was phased, and each phase profoundly altered his architectural language. In Britain (1933–1939), he collaborated with Serge Chermayeff on the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea (1935) — a milestone of British modernist architecture. A pure white seaside cultural center with a vast curved glass stair tower, translating Continental European modernist language into a gentler form adapted to the English coastal climate and class culture. The Pavilion's fluid horizontals and transparent curtain wall embody Mendelsohn's enduring concern with "democratic space" — a cultural facility for a working-class resort town should feel like a palace.

In Palestine (1939–1941), Mendelsohn faced entirely different conditions: Jerusalem's traditional stone-building ordinance required all buildings to use local Jerusalem stone. He accepted this constraint and found new expressive possibilities within it. Hadassah University Hospital (1938, Mount Scopus) is his most important work of this period: the continuous horizontals and rounded-corner balconies still bear Mendelsohn's recognizable signature, but the material has completely transformed from glass and steel to golden Jerusalem stone. The building's sense of exile is double — distanced from both the European city he knew and the material that made his architecture famous. Mendelsohn's adaptability is breathtaking: he left three stylistically distinct modernisms in three different corners of the world.

In the United States (1941–1953), Mendelsohn's primary commissions came from Jewish communities — a series of synagogues across Cleveland, St. Louis, and St. Paul. These works were long neglected by architectural historians but have been rediscovered in recent years. Mendelsohn fused Midwestern regional conditions, modernist simplified geometry, and Jewish religious spatial traditions to create a unique "exile modernism." He died in 1953, never seeing his legacy reassessed in the postwar era. But architectural history today confirms: Mendelsohn was the early 20th century's supreme master of the curve and the dynamic, and his work bridged the dream of Expressionism with the demands of the modern city.