The Daniel Wolf Building, designed by the architect Erich Mendelsohn in 1939, was for many years neglected and divided up into numerous partitions, until in 1998 a decision was taken for its conservation. Architect Dagan Mochly had all the partitions removed to expose the building’s reverse-parabola inner space. This is one of the most interesting structures built by Mendelsohn in Israel – or anywhere else – and it is unique in every respect as a research/industrial building. Its tiled, pointed-arch roof is one of a kind at the Weizmann Institute and among Mendelsohn’s works.
It resembles the barns and factories that were widespread in Europe in the early twentieth century. One such is Peter Behrens’s 1910 AEG turbine factory, famous for its simple shape and barrelvaulted roof, which has become an icon and a harbinger of Modernism in its early German version, the Jugendstil (“youth style”). In designing the Wolf Building 30 years after Behrens’s turbine factory, Mendelsohn gave a new meaning, in the spirit of the International Style, to the vaults familiar to him from Germany. As in the Weizmann House, whose round windows were nautically inspired, Mendelsohn turned this entire building into a large upside-down ship; its hull serves as the roof while its portholes appear on the façade.
The Daniel Wolf Building, designed by the architect Erich Mendelsohn in 1939, was for many years neglected and divided up into numerous partitions, until in 1998 a decision was taken for its conservation. Architect Dagan Mochly had all the partitions removed to expose the building’s reverse-parabola inner space. This is one of the most interesting structures built by Mendelsohn in Israel – or anywhere else – and it is unique in every respect as a research/industrial building. Its tiled, pointed-arch roof is one of a kind at the Weizmann Institute and among Mendelsohn’s works.
It resembles the barns and factories that were widespread in Europe in the early twentieth century. One such is Peter Behrens’s 1910 AEG turbine factory, famous for its simple shape and barrelvaulted roof, which has become an icon and a harbinger of Modernism in its early German version, the Jugendstil (“youth style”). In designing the Wolf Building 30 years after Behrens’s turbine factory, Mendelsohn gave a new meaning, in the spirit of the International Style, to the vaults familiar to him from Germany. As in the Weizmann House, whose round windows were nautically inspired, Mendelsohn turned this entire building into a large upside-down ship; its hull serves as the roof while its portholes appear on the façade.