Metropolitan Architecture: Karl Scheffler and Alfred Messel's Search for a New Urbanity

摘要

Just over a century ago, the art and architectural critic Karl Scheffler noted, "it is no accident that at the moment when the inherent organization of the metropolis is propelled by the pressures of economy, a new form of metropolitan architecture emerges for which the department store has become the symbol." This definition of a modern architecture, intimately related to the modern city and its spatial and commercial pressures, was for Scheffler most vividly expressed in the Wertheim department store in Berlin, designed by Alfred Messel from 1896 to 1904.