ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

Frankfurt am Main was, next to Berlin, perhaps Germany’s most important center of 20th-century architectural developments. Its attempts to initiate an era of “New Building” with innovative social housing programs and extensive public works construction in the 1920s and its impressive post-World War II rebuilding program that culminated with the creation of a publicly funded “Museum Mile” in the 1980s have given Frankfurt an architectural prominence that far outweighs its modest size. The building of dozens of Europe’s tallest skyscrapers has made Frankfurt’s skyline similarly distinctive. Located on the Main River at the edge of western Germany’s densely populated Rhein-Main industrial area, Frankfurt is the capital of the German state of Hesse and one of Europe’s most important banking, commercial, industrial, and transportation centers. It began the 20th century as a province of Prussia under the guidance of Mayor Franz Adickes (1846–1915), who initiated a series of reform-minded urb...

Designed by Erich Mendelsohn, completed 1921 True to modernism’s precepts, the Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany, designed and built by Erich Mendelsohn from 1919 to 1921, is one of the most unique expressions of avant-garde architecture of the early 20th century. Born in 1887, Mendelsohn was drawn to architecture at a young age. Like so many artists and architects at the fin-de-siècle, he believed that a new era was dawning, and that new forms of architecture were necessary for the modern epoch. In 1913 Mendelsohn met the astrophysicist Erwin Finlay Freundlich; the two men discovered shared interests and developed an enduring friendship. Freundlich introduced Mendelsohn to the thenunpublished radical theory of relativity by Albert Einstein, ideas that would profoundly influence European intellectual thought, as well as the visual arts, for years to come. Freundlich; was interested in making observations that would confirm Einstein’s new theory, and Mendelsohn sought to adapt Einstein...

As a German industrial and commercial center in the Prussian Rhine province, Düsseldorf expanded rapidly in the last quarter of the 19th century, serving as the banking and trading center for the heavily industrialized Ruhrgebiet (Ruhr Valley) to the east. Industrialization and continuous development as a trade-fair center shaped the city and its architecture along the Rhine River. Noteworthy commercial and administrative structures were built in the first half of the 20th century, but during World War II much of the city was destroyed by Allied bombing raids. Although some prewar buildings were undamaged or restored, a great deal of construction in the 1950s and 1960s transformed the cityscape, with many notable achievements. In 1946, the Allied occupation designated Düsseldorf the capital of the new state of Northrhine-Westphalia, and, as a result, prominent new structures associated with state capital status have enhanced the city’s architectural character. Düsseldorf has long been ...

The Darmstadt artists’ colony was founded in West Germany in 1899 by Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig von Hessen of Darmstadt, grandson of Queen Victoria and the last ruler of the formerly independent state, which became part of the German Empire in 1871. Ernst Ludwig was one of the most influential of the new patrons of contemporary architecture and design movements in the early 20th century. He was familiar with the English Arts and Crafts movement because of his frequent trips to England and his having already commissioned Baillie Scott in 1897 to design furniture and interior decorations for the dining and drawing rooms of his palace at Darmstadt. C.R.Ashbee was invited to design the light fittings, and his Guild and School of Handicraft in London was asked to make both furniture and fittings. The colony was a response to a memorandum prepared for the parliament and important local people by Alexander Kock, proprietor of a local wallpaper factory. He and others acknowledged the important ro...

With the Rhine River winding slowly through the city and its towering cathedral spires, Cologne has long provided the German imagination with rich images of artistic and national Romanticism. Its idyllic landscape and key location on a major waterway have supported the city’s evolution as an important commercial and industrial center. The Entries A–F 523 history of Cologne’s architectural developments in the 20th century clearly joins the two strands of artistic enchantment and dynamic economy. The city’s built landscape served a distinct defensive function at the close of the 19th century. Developments in military technology had brought about an increased target range of weapons, and Cologne’s medieval city wall with its buffer zone leading up to fortification structures was insufficient to protect Cologne from enemy fire. In 1881 the Prussian government moved the inner medieval fortress ring outward, and the approximately one-square-mile, crescent-shaped area created by the relocatio...

Reciprocal reasons justify historians emphasizing the modern era when studying Berlin’s architectural history: the sheer amount built and the sheer amount destroyed. Unique among European capitals, Berlin exemplifies both formative dynamism and annihilative zest. Between the German unification and reunification (1871–1991), razing spoke as much as raising—and each still speaks today. In 1800 Berlin was still a moderate, regional city. Centuries of accommodating the Hohenzollern and their baroque and neo-classical edifices (by Schülters and Schinkel, respectively) added dignity, not development. However, by 1900, Berlin emerged a continental parvenu—an empire seat whose aggregate population had multiplied 15 times (from 170,000 to 2.7 million), making it Europe’s third-ranked metropolis and possibly the most densely inhabited. Heavy industry and railway centraliza tion induced immigration, necessitating rapid, blanketing, polycentric growth. Mietskas ernen (rental barracks) distended ou...

Designed by Hans Hollein; completed 1982 Since the 1990s, it has not been uncommon for architects and their clients to break with the two previously prevailing alternatives—temple or warehouse—for art museums, but such a typological rupture had been dramatically anticipated two decades earlier, by Hans Hollein in the Museum Abteiberg, a unique building tailored to an unusual site and a distinctive collection. The Pritzker Prize laureate of 1985, who was born in Vienna in 1934 and is an artist, teacher, and creator of furniture, interiors, and exhibitions, has at Mönchengladbach assembled a virtual primer of museum design, one that has brought a heretofore unknown visceral excitement to the vocation of museum going. In contrast to later attempts in this genre, however, Hollein’s achievement has contributed to an intensified appreciation of the museum’s contents rather than making a personal statement at their expense. Although Hollein has learned from the institutional buildings of Loui...