Genevieve Hendricks | Erich Mendelsohn's Twentieth-Century City-scape Built Anew with Light and Print
The Weimar years, fraught with political and economic tensions, were a stimulating period for architecture and the arts, with new ideas stirring and producing modernisms both multifaceted and in constant flux. Photography emerged as the most important means through which artists and architects began to clarify the new kinds of experience thrown forth by the metropolis that in its enormous scale, its complex interlacing of activities, and its furious tempo, seemed to render obsolete the traditional modes of interpretation. Specifically, photographs which reflected the transformation of modern formal and spatial ideas in architecture were reaching a wider public, delineating the role that new structures performed as integral parts of a dynamic and haptic metropolitan scene.
Perhaps one of the most astute proponents of this phenomenon was Erich Mendelsohn, who played a pivotal role in role in revitalizing and revolutionizing architecture in Germany throughout the 1920s. In addition to directing his own successful architectural office, he lectured, wrote, traveled and, in 1926, published Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten, the collection of iconoclastic photographs and cryptic captions which would have such a profound effect on European perceptions of the American urban landscape. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, his understanding of the power of photography both to define and to shape the reception of his own architecture led him to control, as much as possible, the printed presentation of his built structures in order to spread discourse and to open up new ways of thinking about the phenomenology of the urban environment.
For the “Thinking Urban Space Conference,” I propose to examine the relationships connecting textual reproduction, photographic effect and modern architecture in the Weimar years using the work of Mendelsohn so as to establish a paradigm by which to understand the interrelations between new architecture, the urban environment, and new media in interwar Germany. In order to situate Mendelsohn’s relationship to photography and its role as an essential tool for the architect, this discussion will focus on an examination of Mendelsohn’s own photographs, published in Amerika, considering the role of the architect as photographer as well as photography’s relation to other modes of visual experimentation opening up at that time, particularly cinematic, and probing his position regarding claims of authorship and authorization. Such a contextualization with its focus on Mendelsohn’s relationship to photography, and concomitantly, on the nuanced architectural, photographic and editorial networks at play, highlights photography’s particular role in conveying new ideas of order and experience at this time. The images Mendelsohn authored and authorized played an active part in shaping the conception, perception and reception of his built structures within their urban environment, opening up new means of affecting (and ultimately effecting) reality, and charging an already active field with radical new force and vitality.