Publications

Forthcoming title: AA Documents 4

Hat Factory, Luckenwalde
Erich Mendelsohn
Frank Barkow, Kathleen James, John McAslan, Rowan Moore, Ken Powell, Francesca Rogier Photography:Charles Tashima
Format t.b.a. Autumn 1997 ISBN 1 870890 82 5
Price tba

Mendelsohn's Hat Factory in Luckenwalde is slowly re-emerging from physical and historical obscurity. Like many other significant works, it had vanished into what was perceived by the West as the grey, undifferentiated landscape of the German Democratic Republic; since reunification changed the political context, the landscape has returned to view.

The book offers a timely reassessment of a building which has long been thought to represent a radical break in Mendelsohn's thinking, signalling at once the end of an expressionist phase (exemplified by the Einstein Tower) and the start of a drive towards a more rational form conducted in the Schocken department stores in Stuttgart, Breslau and Chemnitz. Essays and photographs, both historical and contemporary, are accompanied by proposals from the AA's Intermediate Unit 8 students for the factory's re-use.