The forgotten fixer.

WERNER HEGEMANN AND THE SEARCH FOR UNIVERSAL URBANISM

By Christiane Crasemann Collins. London: W.W. Norton. 2005. [pounds sterling]35

Born in 1881, Werner Hegemann was of the Modernist generation but never trained as an architect and did not draw. His possible claim to fame is based on two different roles; first as an authority on town-planning between 1910 and 1920 alternating between Germany and the United States, second as editor during the 1920s of the leading Berlin monthly Wasmuths Monatshefte fur Baukunst and its sister journal Stadtebau. Having annoyed the Nazis in 1933, he fled via Switzerland to the States where he died in 1936. Christiane Collins came across Hegemann's widow when she and her husband George were researching their important book on Camillo Sitte in the mid '60s, and she was given his letters and papers. Forty years later, and with further research, this record fills a historical gap and makes a mild claim for Hegemann as forgotten hero. Nobody will be surprised by the work: a totally conventional house for himself of 1924 and some American planning schemes based on the Garden City concept. His ideas on the development of town planning and the need to integrate buildings into the whole seem intelligent enough, if rather general. His lecture tours and consultancy in the States do at least seem to have persuaded about the need for planning. As a critic he was not particularly prescient, and he veered dangerously close to supporting the later Nazi architects Schmitthenner and Schulze-Naumburg before recognising the latter's racism. He managed to annoy the Modernists enough to earn the boycott of his journal by leaving Frank Lloyd Wright out of his account of the United States, failing to back Mendelsohn on the planning battle over the Herpich Store, and being gratuitously rude about the Amsterdam School. He hid behind pseudonyms, added sly editorial riders, and one gets the impression that he enjoyed throwing his weight about. J.J.P. Oud counted him as a friend, was shabbily treated by the magazine, and tried to forgive: his shining honour leaves Hegemann's tarnished. All in all, Hegemann comes across less as a creative figure or scholar than as a mover and fixer in architectural politics.