This book vividly illustrates the ways in which buildings designed by many of Germany's most celebrated twentieth century architects were embedded in widely held beliefs about the power of architecture to influence society. German Architecture for a Mass Audience also demonstrates the way in which these modernist ideas have been challenged and transformed, most recently in the rebuilding of central Berlin.

Using a social approach to explain the formal aspects of early 20th-century architecture, this book demonstrates that the move away from historical styles and towards an engagement with space was predicted in part by a shift in the public for architecture. By the 1910s German archite cts and their patrons addressed the working and lower middle classes in buildings which they hoped would, by being experienced in the same way regardless of social station, help transcend the countries deep polical divisions. Attaching modernist architecture to mass culture and to the kind of spectacle more often...

Erich Mendelsohn's buildings, erected throughout Germany between 1920 and 1932, epitomized architectural modernity for his countrymen. In this study, Kathleen James examines his department stores, office buildings and cinemas, the downtown counterparts to the famous housing projects built during the same years in Frankfurt and Berlin. Demonstrating the degree to which their dynamic presence stemmed from Mendelsohn's attention to their consumer-oriented functions, James shows Mendelsohn to be more than an Expressionist, as he is usually characterized.