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Erich Mendelsohn: German- That Evening

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Erich Mendelsohn: German- That Evening Carlos Scarpa, Berkeley, California, 1969. CARLO SCARPA { IN PERSON } By Max Levy architecture history courses, my introduction to In September and October 2007, the Gerald D. Hines Scarpa was up close and personal. He came to Berkeley to refine the exhibition design on-site and to supervise its installation. A few days before the College of Architecture at the University of Houston show opened, I came across a small poster announc- ing that Professor Scarpa would lecture on his work hosted the exhibition Erich Mendelsohn: German- that evening. Though the eminent historian Vincent Scully would eventually place Scarpa “somewhere between Wright and Kahn,” I found no one at the American Architect, 1887–1953, organized by architecture school that day who had heard of him. I went to the lecture anyway. In a room that would have seated 300 people, only five showed up. This Mendelsohn’s biographer Regina Stephan for the prompted much animated discussion between Scarpa and his interpreter, and soon we heard from Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen Stuttgart. Dallas the lectern: “Professor Scarpa feels this room is too large for such a small group. We must move to a . space better tailored to the scale of the gathering.” E V I H architect Max Levy reflects on an earlier exhibition Scarpa waited with genial forbearance, chain- C R A smoking and smiling over at us occasionally, while M L I F the search went on for another venue. We sat there C I of Mendelsohn’s drawings in an installation designed F I silently, too self-conscious to bail out of the awkward C A P situation. At last a smaller room was found all the D N A way across campus, and away the whole group by Carlo Scarpa, and the impact it still has on him. M U marched. It was like a scene from a Fellini movie: E S U nightfall, the Pacific fog rolling in, the AV guy in M T R hen I turn the page of an architec- therefore, to learn that Scarpa executed a project in the lead pushing his slide projector on a noisy metal A Y E ture magazine and the work of the United States. Seen by very few people, it cart, then Scarpa in his gorgeous sport coat and long L E K Carlo Scarpa appears unexpectedly, remained in place for only one month, and only a woolen scarf, followed by his interpreter, and finally R E B I feel a quiet inner thrill. Since few mediocre photos survive. the ragtag audience of five. A I N R Scarpa’s death in 1978, his caress In March 1969 the University Art Museum at the In the new room, Scarpa began projecting images O F I L of materials, his strange but faultless sense of place- University of California, Berkeley, mounted an of his work. We saw a travertine door, a plaster ceil- A W C F ment and proportion, the contemplative nature of exhibition of 146 tiny but epic architectural sketches ing polished to an almost mirror finish, fittings that O 35 Y his details seem increasingly moving. My apprecia- by Erich Mendelsohn, the great German modernist. combined cast iron, bronze, and rosewood, rooms T I e S t i R tion is heightened by my awareness that his output The drawings were presented in an installation of loosely defined by planes of luscious materials dis- c E . V 8 I 0 N was relatively limited. Confined mostly to the architectural stagecraft created by Scarpa. I was an solving into shadow, windows like glass boxes of 0 U 2 Y R S floating world of Venice and a few other Italian architecture student at Berkeley at the time and light, and a birdbath so poetic it was heart-stopping. E E T M R sites, Scarpa’s work tantalizes because of its rarity wandered into this confluence of masters. We saw the Museo Correr, the Canova Plaster Cast M U O U C and distance from us. It may come as a revelation, Though I knew a bit about Mendelsohn from my Gallery, the Olivetti showroom, the Querini S Mendelsohn was a contemporary of Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Arnold Schönberg. Until the 1960s, when his reputation began to fade, he was often grouped with the founding masters of modernism. Stampalia Library, the Museo Castelvecchio. And campus. This bucolic scene contrasted with the uni- we saw schematic drawings for a work in progress, versity’s politically and emotionally charged atmos- the Brion-Vega Cemetery. Each drawing teemed, phere, fueled by the ungovernable mass protests margin to margin, with ideas in embryo, some pre- over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, cisely delineated, others a mist of color and spirit. sexual liberation, pacifism, feminism, and free As the jewel-like images were projected, Scarpa speech. Just fifty yards away from the brown brick kept up a vivacious commentary in Italian. He building was Sproul Plaza, ground zero for leafle- stood next to the slide projector in the middle of the teers, demonstrations, and moments of anarchy. room, facing the screen along with the audience, his Designing the exhibition presented Scarpa with face grotesquely uplit, cigarette smoke swirling two immediate hurdles. First there was the budget. luminously as he spoke. Despite the language Accustomed to working with lavish materials, the barrier he conveyed an unforgettable sensitivity to virtuoso was limited in Berkeley to little more than materials, details, and space. plywood. Second, the powerhouse space was too big Mendelsohn was a contemporary of Albert for the display of such small drawings. As with the Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Arnold Schönberg. lecture, Scarpa looked to refashion the place so that Until the 1960s, when his reputation began to fade, it would be “tailored to the scale of the gathering.” he was often grouped with the founding masters of Using eight-foot-tall panels of fir plywood, he tight- modernism. His career was launched by the ly defined a space in the center of the room that in remarkable conceptual sketches presented in the plan was jaggedly configured, something like a Berkeley exhibition, most of them about the size of stroke of lightning. (The remainder of the power- a notecard, some no larger than a postage stamp. house was treated much as the poché in an architec- Many had been drawn on scraps of paper in the tural drawing). The panels, stained either red- trenches during World War I, where he served orange or loden green, were detailed so that the with the German forces on the Russian front. A plywood’s edge laminations were revealed. few bold but miniature strokes of black ink or Mendelsohn’s drawings, with their concentrated pencil revealed structures of unprecedented black strokes, oversized creamy white mats, and dynamism, seemingly rushing forward into a wooden frames stained nearly black, looked exqui- hopeful future. The drawings were also unusual site against the strangely colored gallery walls. for the way they depicted buildings spatially, seen Smaller drawings were hung somewhat higher than from an angle instead of flattened and static in the normal, meeting one’s gaze at eye level. By contrast, plan/section/elevation tradition. the larger drawings required a bow of the head: The setting for the exhibition was a space about they were mounted on low plywood lean-tos that the size of a basketball court inside a windowless, created spatial eddies in the gallery. A further tiny brown brick Romanesque building, roofed by a detail: the inside corners of the mat cutouts were single gable with a large ridge skylight of steel and radiused, showing care for the drawings’ frailty and 36 wire-glass. Built in 1905, this building had served as organic lines. The towering scale of the space over- e t i c . the university’s powerhouse until the 1930s, when it head was reduced by suspended swaths of white 8 0 was picked clean and given over to gallery space. silk. There was no artificial light: soft northern 0 2 R The building sat among oaks and old-growth red- California sunshine poured through the big sky- E M M woods next to Strawberry Creek, a dark, cathedral- light, was filtered by the silk, and finally filled the U S like sliver of nature that tumbles through the hilly place with a chiaroscuro of liquid calm. Erich Mendelsohn Exhibition, Carlos Scarpa designer, University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, 1969. accepted Louise’s invitation in January, arrived in February, and the show opened in March. It is recorded that he referred to the carpenter assigned to the installation as his “lumberjack,” though it is unclear whether this was an affectionate term for the big fellow in flannel shirt and jeans, or an expression of frustration over the carpenter’s coarse workmanship. fter the exhibition closed, it was offered as a traveling show to several museums around the country. Interestingly, two of them were the Dallas Museum of Art and TheA Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, both of which turned it down. The Museum of Modern Art in New York took the show, but only the framed Mendelsohn drawings made the trip. The plywood panels wound up in a university storeroom, no doubt scavenged over the years for other purposes. In retrospect, I have to admit that though I was intrigued by the lecture and exhibition, I didn’t fully appreciate what I had wandered into. That apprecia- I visited the exhibition three times during its remarkable buildings at each stop, his promise as an tion has taken years to mature, deepened by my .
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