He had been under gas attack in the trenches, yet it is hard not to think that his primary motivation in the desert of Utah was revenge on the Nazis. How can this Erich Mendelsohn be the architect of the dark and deathly German Village in the Utah desert? Mendelsohn left no correspondence or notebooks relating to the Dugway Proving Ground project, where napalm and poison gases were developed and tested. Here, with the Russian-born dandy Serge Chermayeff, he built, among a number of fine houses, the De la Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea. Mendelsohn left for England when Hitler was voted into power in 1933.

Outside Berlin, the streamlined department stores he built for Schocken at Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Chemnitz were hugely influential worldwide. These included the Metal Workers Union building, the Universum Cinema on Kurfürstendamm, the Columbushaus (Galeries Lafayette) and several villas, including his own. Over the next 10 or 12 years, Mendelsohn developed beautiful, sweeping, clean-lined, light-filled architecture - much of it in Berlin - that appeared to catch the spirit of the old German Enlightenment and represent it afresh in the uncertain days of the Weimar Republic. In 1919, during the great flu epidemic, he began work on the Einstein Tower, an astrophysics laboratory for the German mathematician and scientist, at Potsdam on the edge of Berlin. From the trenches of the great war he sent home visionary sketches of extraordinary streamlined, or expressionist, buildings. A Jew from Allenstein in East Prussia (today, Olsztyn in Poland), Mendelsohn settled in Berlin, where he trained as an architect after studying economics in Munich. Mendelsohn's involvement in this deathly project, seemed, at first, bizarre. I was alerted to the story of German Village by Mike Davis, who features it in his provocative book Dead Cities: A Natural History, a study of the vulnerability of modern cities from New York to Tokyo to destruction by man and nature.

Goodby to berlin