Gli interventi decorativi nei Grandi Magazzini Wertheim di Alfred Messel a Berlino dal 1897 al 1906

The solutions adopted by Alfred Messel for commercial architecture, incredibly coherent for the german architecture at that time, have represented an exemplary case of the expressiveness and functionality level reached by the architectonic project in the Gründerzeit age, particularly meaningful for the growth they reached with Peter Behrens’ work. Master of the first Modernity, Messel has always been studied with attention and celebrated as one of the great authors of that formal architecture language’s revolution, which found in Germany its center. His several supplies to art applied to decoration of the Wertheim buildings haven’t received the same attention. In Robert Habel’s definition, Wertheim’s Warehouse represent an “incunabulum of the Modern”.