Columbushaus

The Columbushaus (Columbus House) 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.

[1][2] 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.

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.

[8] "Dedicated to an idealist version of America", it was intentionally revolutionary,[9] 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.

A consortium of German investors planned to build a branch of the French department store Galeries Lafayette on the site and engaged Mendelsohn to design it because of his prestige as a modernist.

[15] There was to have been a two-storey rooftop restaurant, and large letters spelling out the name of the department store around the edge of the roof, and the foyer was to have also served as a subway entrance.

[18][19] However, in February 1929 the design was rejected as likely to exacerbate the traffic problems; instead, permission was given for a nine-storey structure, and in June that year, the start of construction was announced for September or October.

[23] On 1 December 1939, Richard von Hegener rented three or four offices in the building for a cover organisation founded to carry out the programme of execution of the physically and mentally unfit, which became known as Action T4 after the nearby address Tiergartenstraße 4 to which its headquarters moved in the spring of 1940.

[21] During the East German workers' revolt on 17 June 1953, the Mayor of Kreuzberg, Willy Kressmann, urged the police to offer no resistance, and they threw their uniforms from the windows and hung out a white flag, but the enraged crowd nonetheless set the building on fire.

[21][31][32][33] However, before the exchange took effect on July 1, environmentalists occupied it, built an encampment, and declared it an extra-legal zone, the 'Norbert Kubat Corner', named for a young man who had taken his life in jail.

Protesters were drawn to the site from all over the Federal Republic and in some cases from abroad; a radio station was established, and there was regular press coverage including foreign TV;[32] the number occupying the site grew to about 600, and after the West Berlin Senate, having failed to obtain help from either the British or the Soviet occupying forces, tried first to fence off the area and then to have the police disperse them (playing loud music at night among other tactics), they fortified the encampment and threw stones at the police.

[36] After the adjacent street was renamed Columbiadamm, for Charles Lindbergh's plane WB-2 Miss Columbia (N-X-237), the empty building close to Tempelhof airport was called Columbia-Haus.

However, the striking resemblance of the names caused many to identify the Columbia-Haus with Columbushaus, thus referring the history of the concentration camp to the former building by Erich Mendelsohn.