Expressionist Architecture

Expressionist architecture is an early twentieth century style, centered in Germany, that translated the emotive distortion and subjective intensity of Expressionist painting into three dimensional built form, favoring sculptural, often curving shapes over the rectilinear vocabulary of classical or early modernist design. Its major surviving landmark is the Einstein Tower in Potsdam, designed by the architect Erich Mendelsohn between 1917 and 1920 and built between 1920 and 1921 as an amorphic structure of reinforced concrete, commissioned to house and symbolize research into Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. According to a well known account, Einstein toured the completed tower with Mendelsohn and offered only a single word of judgment hours later: organic. The building still functions today as a working solar observatory, part of the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, and stands as the style's principal permanent monument.