These early sketches for Jerusalem's Hadassah University Hospital were made just after Mendelsohn emigrated to Palestine in 1935. The final complex of buildings, which includes a nursing school and a research institute as well as a hospital, stands on Mount Scopus, over-looking the ancient walled city of Jerusalem and the Moab Mountains. Mendelsohn believed in an organic unity between drawing and building and between building and site, and the distinctive sweeping lines of his exterior perspective drawings were intended to capture the immediate appearance of the whole. The drawings also reveal his preoccupation with the plasticity of reinforced concrete. Mendelsohn's architectural ideas were shaped in the chaotic climate of Germany in the period around World War I and, most dramatically, by his association with leaders of the Expressionist movement.
Gallery label from 75 Years of Architecture at MoMA, 2007.
