Erich Mendelsohn Biography

(born March 21, 1887, Allenstein, Ger.—died Sept. 15, 1953, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.) German architect. While studying architecture in Munich, he was influenced by the Blaue Reiter group of Expressionist artists. Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower, Potsdam (1919–21), a highly sculptural structure, reflects his early preoccupation with science fiction. In the 1920s he designed a number of imaginative structures, including the Schocken stores in Stuttgart (1927) and Chemnitz (1928), notable for their prominent use of glass in strongly horizontal compositions. He fled the Nazis in 1933 and eventually settled in the U.S.; his American works include the Maimonides Hospital, San Francisco (1946).

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