page_title: Columbushaus
section_title: Architecture
hierarchical_section_title: Columbushaus / Architecture
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Note: This description has been identified as biased or incorrect: SED-bias. Berlin, brennendes Columbiahaus ADN-ZB/Junge/18.6.1953/ Faschistische Provokation im demokratischen Sektor von Groß-Berlin am 17.6.1953 U.B.z.: Blick auf das von Faschisten in Brand gesetzte HO-Geschäft im Columbiahaus am Potsdamer Platz. Information added by Wikimedia users.
context_page_description: The Columbushaus was a nine-storey modernist office and shopping building in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, designed by Erich Mendelsohn and completed in 1932. It was an icon of progressive architecture which passed relatively unscathed through World War II but was gutted by fire in the June 1953 uprising in East Germany. The ruin was subsequently razed in 1957 because it stood in the border strip; the site where the structure once stood was occupied by activists shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall.
context_section_description: The Columbushaus has been described as a "little skyscraper". It was a horizontally detailed steel-frame building, the alternating bands of windows and spandrels on the upper floors prefigured by a conceptual sketch of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. (Mendelsohn later claimed that he had to include masonry courses to allow for neon signs, and would otherwise have used only metal and glass.) The client required the façade to curve to follow the line of Friedrich-Ebert-Straße and also specified that the floor plans be flexible to allow for future use as a department store; Erich Mendelsohn's solution was to have the window frames of the outer walls bear much of the load on the upper floors in order to greatly limit the number of internal supports and enable configuration of spaces at will by means of partitions. On the lower floors, with their continuous glazing for retail use, the load was shifted to interior supports using cross girders and cantilever girders. It was the most advanced office building in Europe, and the first building in Germany to have ventilation equipment.
  
  Stylistically, it was "perhaps the most pronounced and rigorous example of modern office building design in Berlin." It was conceived as a real piece of urban progressivism, in contrast to the fantasy world epitomised by Haus Vaterland, on the opposite side of the square.
  Columbus Haus serves as an object of redemption, a spatial synthesis through which the path to pure reason can be rediscovered. It is the ultimate object of negation, conceived in rejection of the degeneration that obsessive consumption has caused to the culture. Its presence attempts to break the conspiracy between architecture and the persistence of the memory of Rome, the dangerous and uncontrollable evocation of ancient gods and mysteries. It is as if architecture had become naked, shedding all deception to purify itself and the city.
   "Dedicated to an idealist version of America", it was intentionally revolutionary, its height and modernity in sharp contrast to the other buildings in the square, which were predominantly classical in detailing and many of which dated to the Gründerzeit of the last quarter of the 19th century. It was to have been part of a reconfiguration of Potsdamer Platz and the adjacent Leipziger Platz as modern spaces which was planned by Stadtbaurat Martin Wagner; as a result of the Depression, the Columbushaus was the only part of the project built. Mendelsohn planned the Columbushaus as part of a wall of skyscrapers around the reformed square; first, in 1928, proposing to combine both squares and in a second conceptual sketch, in 1931, making an octagonal plaza separated from Potsdamer Platz proper. Although no other buildings were built to place it in the intended context, the "last masterpiece of Mendelsohn's German period" was highly influential.
caption: Columbushaus on fire, 17 June 1953
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