Einstein Tower, Solar observatory in Telegrafenberg, Potsdam, Germany
The Einstein Tower is a solar observatory on Telegrafenberg hill in Potsdam with a zinc-clad dome and curved exterior walls. The building houses telescope equipment and underground laboratories for studying solar magnetic fields.
Architect Erich Mendelsohn designed the observatory from 1919 with curved forms in the expressionist style and completed it in 1924. Material shortages after World War I led to the use of brick masonry under stucco instead of concrete.
Einstein reportedly toured the finished building in silence and later whispered "Organic" at a committee meeting, a word Mendelsohn accepted. The architect said he let the form emerge from "the mystique around Einstein's universe". The tower is often cited as a landmark of expressionist architecture.
The observatory operates as a research facility of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics and can be visited during occasional guided tours. Access is via paths through the wooded Telegrafenberg with some uphill sections.
The tower's optical path runs down two stacked wooden platforms, each six metres high, to a 60 cm lens with a 14 m focal length. A rotating mirror then sends the sunlight into a 14 m spectrograph lab set in the basement behind an earthen wall on the south side.
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