Which sites are included in the UNESCO World Heritage List is the result of a huge bureaucratic selection process.

But coincidence also plays a role.

This is particularly evident in cases in which it is not individual buildings but whole groups of buildings that are designated World Heritage.

If the owners of certain buildings do not agree with the listing, the applicants simply have another work listed.

So it can easily happen that mediocre works are declared World Heritage Sites, while masterpieces go unnoticed.

The UNESCO World Heritage List currently includes two work complexes of modern architecture: the buildings by Le Corbusier and those by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Two brave initiatives are currently trying to register the oeuvre of Alvar Aalto and Erich Mendelsohn as a World Heritage Site.

Both modern heroes stood outside the mainstream, albeit for very different reasons.

While in Aalto's work a Nordic humanity found expression in architecture, in his early work Mendelsohn transformed Expressionism into an incredibly elegant dynamic of urban architecture and later combined modernity with the vernacular architecture of Palestine.

Both architects gave architectural expression to a young nation: Aalto's architecture stands for the Finnish welfare state and Mendelsohn's for a Zionism sensitive to the environment.

Its architecture is described as timeless but not placeless.

Aalto had already begun to turn away from functionalism in the 1930s and to focus his designs on “the individual, the community and their well-being” (application for World Heritage).

Aalto's approach influences the development of Finnish architecture to this day.

The Alvar Aalto Foundation's nomination for "Aalto's humane, modern architecture" lists 13 UNESCO-worthy buildings in Finland, which will later be supplemented by buildings outside Finland, in Germany, France and the USA, for example.

Buildings in eight countries

The international team, which includes “the most famous Jewish architect of the modern age”, as the members call Mendelsohn, has not got that far yet.

You have identified buildings in eight countries in which Mendelsohn built that would deserve UNESCO protection.

Unfortunately, there is a high probability that some of Mendelsohn's best buildings will not be listed because their owners (in Russia, for example) will not follow suit.

It could be heard at a top-class conference in Berlin, for which experts from Israel, Poland, Canada and Italy met recently in the building of the Metalworkers' Association in Berlin-Kreuzberg, one of the finest Mendelsohn factories in Berlin.

They want to finally anchor Mendelsohn in the canon of the best modern architects and thereby reverse the unjust judgments of architectural historians such as Sigfried Giedion or Arthur Drexler.

Eran Mordohovich, President of the ICOMOS Association for the Preservation of Monuments in Israel, and Maristella Casciato of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles agreed that Mendelsohn's particular ability to respond to place set him apart from other modern masters.

The applicants also emphasize a spiritual component.

Mendelsohn's Jewish Cemetery in Koenigsberg, for example, is an interesting contribution to the proto-sacred architects of the Weimar Republic.

After World War II, Mendelsohn became the most sought-after designer of suburban synagogues in the Midwest.

For Alona Nitzan Shiftan of the Technion in Haifa, Mendelsohn's legacy is even "cultural Zionism in practice".

She sees no expression of exile in Mendelsohn's works in Jerusalem, but on the contrary of home.

Finding “attributes and values” and “outstanding universal values” as UNESCO requires should not be difficult given the richness of Mendelsohn's oeuvre.

Still, having to find “narratives of place and diaspora” and a suitable framing that finds political support is not a rewarding task.

It means turning a fascinating artistic life into Excel spreadsheets.

Bogusław Szmygin from Poland named the pitfalls of a “transnational and serial nomination” by UNESCO.

Berlin has already experienced such a dilemma: when the modernist housing estates were placed under UNESCO protection, Bruno Taut's groundbreaking Onkel Tom housing estate in Zehlendorf was not among them.

The owners were not cooperative.

The groundbreaking work has not been listed to this day.