Schocken Department Store: Erich Mendelsohn

AbstractErich Mendelsohn's preliminary sketch, made in 1926, for the Schocken Store in Stuttgart, completed two years later, stands at the center of interconnected stories about the New Building, as the commercial and residential architecture erected in a bold and inexpensive new style was termed in Germany during the 1920s and early thirties; about Mendelsohn, who was one of its most famous and fashionable practitioners; and about the impact that industrialization has had on consumerism and thus in turn upon architectural and urban space. The commercial function and downtown location of the Schocken store, and Mendelsohn's other department stores, office buildings, and single cinema set them slightly apart from the other most celebrated examples of the New Building, even as they established new prototypes for these building types that would be influential for decades around the world. More than any of his contemporaries allied with either the New Building or the broader Modern Movement of which it was a part, Mendelsohn relied, despite having lost on eye to cancer in 1921, on the perspective sketch as the crucial stage in his design process. This enabled him to respond effectively to an urban context that remained invisible in the sketches themselves. The dynamism with which he dressed up such key precedents as Albert Kahn's Ford factories in Detroit, provided an alternative to the palatial settings in which mass produced goods were often sold. At the same time it acknowledged the drama inherent in introduction to consumers of new technology, whether elevators and escalators; new goods, such as radios and gramophones; and, of course, the latest fashions.