ABSTRACT
"England," Eric Mendelsohn wrote in 1934, "is an interregnum." 1934 – the year after he was excluded, for being Jewish, from the Reichsbank competition in Berlin, was forced to flee Germany, and then moved to London. In 1935, Le Corbusier saw things quite differently. Discussing London, he wrote of "the total transformation of architecture and town planning" in The Architectural Review. The occasion for such spectacular language was Highpoint, a tower block of flats in the affluent Highgate section of north London, designed by the Russian Jewish emigre architect Berthold Lubetkin and his firm Tecton. For Le Corbusier, Highpoint, its international style sleekness rising from the winding lanes of the neighborhood that bordered Hampstead Heath, was a prototype, the "seed," he wrote, of an entirely new architectural example, full of promise and about to alter all of London.
