Amerika and Metrópolis: Erich Mendelsohn and Fritz Lang. The expressionist vision of the modern city

Abstract

If the art of modernity is characterized by its fundamentally urban character, the analysis of the view of the contemporary city revealed by two essential works of Expressionism that emerged after a joint trip to the United States in 1924, such as the magnificent photobook Amerika, an architect's travel book, published in 1925 by Erich Mendelsohn, and the iconic film Metropolis by Fritz Lang, premiered in Berlin in 1927, is extremely relevant. This journey had a determining impact, not only on Erich Mendelsohn's own architectural approaches and his relationship with the urban environment, but also on an essential theme in the construction of modernity, namely the debate on the image of the contemporary city. Due to their novel visual conception and the great public projection of their authors (Mendelsohn, author of the Einsteinturm tower was the most successful architect and international repercussion of the Weimar Republic and Fritz Lang would turn his image of the city of the future, Metropolis, into a true mass phenomenon), these works established an unprecedented dialogue between modernity and avant-garde, image and reality, which would decisively influence the architecture of the twentieth century.