THE NEW ARCHITECTURE.
IF we are bewildered by the sketches and photographs of Herr Mendelsohn's projected and completed works, we may turn to the foreword for enlightenment and read as follows :— " The geometry of space, the law of the seizure and the penetra- tion of space, of corporeal determination and of constructed bulk, embrace all fabrics : the simplest equation from the cube to tho sphere, and the highest arising from some cosmic blossoming. forth.
And a few sentences later :— "Out of its own laws Architecture lays down the conditiona that govern its active masses. The dynamic condition—the movement of space—to visualize its linear elements by means of its contours ; the rhythmic condition—to visualize the relation of the masses—by means of the projection of surfaces, and the static condition—the equalization of movement to visualize this as elements of construction by means of ground-plan and section."
Whew ! We had better get back to the illustrations. Herr Mendelsohn's best-known work is the Einstein Tower at Potsdam. This building—half observatory, half laboratory— and a new factory at Luckenwalde both have the impressive- ness of a tank or a gun-turret. But it is a shock to see that one of the rooms in the tower has small windows at about the level of the occupants' knees. The new architecture should at least be convenient and practical. These qualities are, however, absent from Herr Mendelsohn's domestic work, and he light-heartedly makes rooms open out of each other without access to passages. The offices for the Berliner Tageblatt, in Berlin, are quite painfully ugly. The sketches for pleasure pavilions, factories, a "boxing establishment," railway stations, &c., show vitality and imagination, but they would be quite incapable of materialization.
Some good comes out of everything new in art, and time will separate the saner elements in Herr Mendelsohn's work from that which has no other object than to do what no one has done before, because it was not worth doing. In the meantime we need have no fear of a "cosmic blossoming- forth" of " mendelsohninnus."
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