Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism.

A follower of the Modern Movement in 1930 would have been amazed to be told that in 1987 Le Corbusier would be feted as 'Architect of the Century' while Erich Mendelsohn's centenary would pass almost unnoticed, for in 1930 Mendelsohn was the best known German Modernist with the largest office, profuse publications and many important commissions behind him. His Schocken stores and Universum cinema became international models for these building types, he pioneered new methods of construction and made brilliant use of the newly available electric lighting, and he pioneered a dynamic contextualism which has gone strangely unnoticed by the urban design fraternity.

This admirable book is a timely reminder of just how good and inventive Mendelsohn was. It is nicely structured to follow a chronological path while also picking up on a series of topical themes, from relativity to the development of advertising. Kathleen James is a lucid and engaging writer who has unearthed much new material, particularly on the clients and social background, but also on the development of ideas and possible sources. The crucial Expressionist connection seems to be less with painting than with theatre, for example, and Mendelsohn had an intriguing early friendship with Dadaist Hugo Ball. He also had a personal relationship with Einstein and was serious in his attempts to express relativity in the famous tower, which incidentally answered a demanding functional programme. James is good on Mendelsohn's relations with the United States, his connections with Wright and Neutra, and the content of the photo-album he published on his return. But best of all, she outlines convincingly the ingredients of Mendelsohn's subtle urbanism and its relation to new forms of commerce and technology. General histories of the period will in future need a new chapter.

Why has Mendelsohn been so neglected? Most obviously because his career was broken by the Nazis. Deprived of his social and technological base at the then centre of world culture, he had neither clients sympathetic to his progressive ideas nor the means to realize them. He hardly got started in the UK, leaving us only the De la Warr Pavilion and a house. He subsequently built much in provincial Palestine, but conservatively. Arriving in the States in 1941, he found himself marginalized, and built only a few synagogues before his early death of cancer. Mies and Gropius had become the high-priests of the new Modernist agenda defined by Hitchcock and Johnson as The International Style, and Mendelsohn had made the fatal mistake of putting the phone down on Johnson 10 years earlier. He could claim to be as Functionalist as any of his peers - more than most - but for Pevsner et al he was tarred with the brush of Expressionism and therefore not to be taken seriously.

To add insult to injury, most of Mendelsohn's important buildings have been destroyed. I knew of his Jewish cemeteries blown up by the Nazis, but James includes a hitherto unseen photo of the Jewish youth centre in Essen, burned on Kristallnacht. The pioneering stores in Berlin were lost in the war, but Columbus Haus survived only to be burnt in a riot in the early 1950s. The Stuttgart Schocken also survived, but shamefully was demolished in 1960 in favour of a new department store with a new image by Eiermann, his worst work. The Universum cinema fell into disrepair and was disembowelled in the 1970s, its important interior proving as ephemeral as the numerous Odeons which it spawned in the UK. Commercial architecture is perhaps inevitably short-lived, but when key examples in the development of a type are lost, let alone works representative of a major creative talent in as fertile a period as the Weimar Republic, it must be counted cultural deprivation.

PETER BLUNDELL JONES