- Posener’s authoritative study of Poelzig follows the course of the architect’s work through the various phases of his professional career, the moves he made first to Breslau, then to Dresden, finally to Berlin and his uninterrupted work as a professor. I think this source is helpful for me to understand the dawn of the Neues Bauen architecture in Germany. Even though his architectural language is far from the abstract geometries, smooth surfaces, and pure volumes of the movement, these designs can nevertheless be located within the expressionist poetics only at the price of excessive simplification because in Poelzig’s work, the liberty of artistic invention and the exaltation of the subjectivity of the creativity act triumphs over the almost physical accentuation of emotion and interiority of the aesthetic experience that is fundamental to expressionist painting. Besides, I am not quite sure at this moment if there is some connection between Poelzig’s most important work of Expressionism: Max Reinhardt’s 5000-seat Großes Schauspielhaus, Berlin (1919) and Scharoun’s Philharmonic Concert Hall.
LIYANG DING 