Werner Hegemann

Werner Hegemann (June 15, 1881, Mannheim – April 12, 1936, New York City) was an internationally known city planner, architecture critic, and author. His criticism of Hitler and the Nazi party required him to leave Germany with his family in 1933. He died prematurely in New York City in 1936.

Hegemann was the son of Ottmar Hegemann (1839-1900), a manufacturer in Mannheim, and Elise Caroline Friedrich Vorster (1846-1911), daughter of Julius Vorster, a founder of Chemische Fabrik Kalk in Cologne. He graduated from Gymnasium Schloss Plön in 1901. Hegemann began college studies in Berlin, studied art history and economics in Paris, economics at the University of Pennsylvania and in Strasbourg, and completed his doctorate in Munich in 1908.[1] In a 1909 trip to the US, he visited Philadelphia and New York and worked for the "Boston 1915" Exposition, held in Boston in 1909.

Back in Berlin the following year Hegemann was General Secretary of the 1910 Universal City Planning Exhibition held in Berlin in May and June.[2] The exhibition aroused great interest and was reprised in refocused form in Düsseldorf; Hegemann wrote an article about it for a general audience and a two-volume official book.[3] These city planning exhibitions were the first of their kind: Hegemann was in the right place at the right time to play a formative role in the early development of city planning as a profession.

In 1912 he accepted an invitation from the People's Institute in New York to give lectures on city planning in over 20 American cities.[4][5] At the end of his cross country speaking tour, Hegemann published reports on the Californian cities of Oakland and Berkeley. In early 1914 he embarked by ship on a return voyage to Germany via the Pacific, in order to visit the Far East. That July he boarded a German flagged ship in Australia for the final leg of the journey home. World War I broke out as the ship reached the coast of Africa, and it dodged English warships for several weeks before being sequestered for months off the coast of Mozambique. In April, 1915, he stowed-away on a Norwegian vessel bound for the United States, where he spent the duration of the war. In 1916 Hegemann established a firm specializing in city and suburban planning based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with landscape architect Elbert Peets.[6] Hegemann and Peets together published "The American Vitruvius: An Architects' Handbook of Civic Art," a "thesaurus" of civic art for architects, commenting on about 1200 examples of the discipline. Hegemann and Peets designed the Washington Highlands Historic District during this time. In 1918, visiting a friend at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Hegemann met Ida Belle Guthe, daughter of Karl Eugen Guthe. The couple married at her Ann Arbor home in 1920.

Returning to Europe with his new bride in 1921, in 1922 Hegemann built a home in Nikolassee, outside of Berlin. He became editor of Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, published by Ernst Wasmuth Verlagknown, known for its international coverage of architecture and Hegemann's incisive critiques. He wrote several historical books debunking German heroes and, in 1930, the work for which he is best remembered, Das steinerne Berlin: Geschichte der grössten Mietkasernenstadt der Welt (Stony Berlin: History of the Largest Tenement City in the World), which combines historical and architectural criticism. In the introduction he wrote, "It is a German illusion to believe in the possibility of creating an intellectual capital as long as the so-called educated people are almost proud of their inadequate understanding of urban planning."[7] He also wrote political articles and warned against the Nazis, culminating in the book Entlarvte Geschichte (History Unmasked – 1933). Hegemann fled Germany in February, 1933, upon publication of the latter book (dedicated sarcastically to Adolph Hitler). In May, 1933, he was denounced by the Nazis as an "Historical Forger," and his books were burned in the Nazi book burnings.[8]

After several months in Switzerland and France, Hegemann was invited by Alvin Johnson to teach urban planning at The New School for Social Research in New York beginning in November 1933.[9] That October Hegemann left Europe for the United States with his family. He was one of many intellectuals essentially exiled by Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Upon arriving in New York City on November 4, 1933, Hegemann opined that the German people would not tolerate Hitler for more than two more years in power. He began lecturing at the New School and organizing assistance for intellectuals and scholars detained by the Nazis in Germany. In 1935 he was also retained as a lecturer at Columbia University. [10] Also in 1935 the Nazis seized Hegemann's house in Nikolassee. In early 1936 he became ill, first diagnosed with Sciatica, and then hospitalized with apparent pneumonia;[11] While bed-ridden in New York City he worked on his last book, the three-volume City Planning, Housing, intended to supplement and update The American Vitruvius, eventually completed by two co-editors, the last volume appearing in 1938.[12][13] Hegemann died on April 12, 1936, at age 55 in New York City. The treating doctor opined that the cause of death was Tuberculosis Meningitis.

Hegemann's extensive travel, along with his strong education and broad interests, made him an intermediary between architects and city planners throughout Europe and on both sides of the Atlantic. In particular, his The American Vitruvius refers extensively to European design, taking many examples from his book on the Berlin 1910 exhibition, while in Amerikanische Architektur und Stadtbaukunst he informs German architects of American solutions.[14] However, his emphasis on urban planning rather than purely formal considerations and possibly his having not been present during the development of the Modern Movement in architecture in Europe put him at odds with modernists. For example, in 1929 he was forced to retract an accusation that Martin Wagner's primary activity as chief of city planning for Berlin was funnelling architectural commissions to extremist friends,[15] and he labeled Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine project for transforming Paris "only vieux jeu" (old hat) and sarcastically predicted that it was likely to be realized,

[not] because [the skyscrapers] are desirable, healthy, beautiful, and reasonable from the perspective of urban planning but because they are theatrical, romantic, unreasonable, and generally harmful, and because it is part of the money-making activities of a metropolis, in what is literally the world's most international city, Paris, to serve the need for sensation and the vices of native and imported fools.[16]

Selected works

References

  1. ↑ Werner Oechslin, "Between America and Germany: Werner Hegemann's Approach to Urban Planning," in Berlin/New York: Like and Unlike: Essays on Architecture and Art from 1870 to the Present, ed. Josef Paul Kleihues and Christina Rathgeber, New York: Rizzoli, 1993, ISBN 0-8478-1657-5, pp. 281–95, p. 287.
  2. ↑ Christiane Crasemann Collins, Werner Hegemann and the Search for Universal Urbanism, New York: Norton, 2005, ISBN 0-393-73156-1, p. 35.
  3. ↑ "Die Städtebau-Ausstellung und ihre Lehren," Die Woche; Der Städtebau nach den Ergebnissen der allgemeinen Städtebau-Ausstellung in Berlin, 1911, 1913. Collins, p. 51, p. 373, note 45; p. 375, note 72.
  4. ↑ Edward Marshall, "VASTER SKYSCRAPERS INEVITABLE, SAYS GERMAN EXPERT; Dr. Werner Hegemann, One Of the World's Greatest Authorities on City Planning, Says Our Present High Buildings Mean Intolerable Congestion and Will Be Succeeded by Structures Ten Times as Great but More Widely Separated – Faults of Subways Pointed Out," New York Times magazine, April 6, 1913 (pdf) retrieved December 18, 2010.
  5. ↑ Collins, p. 20.
  6. ↑ "Biographical résumé of Elbert Peets," On the Art of Designing Cities: Selected Essays of Elbert Peets, Ed. Paul David Spreiregen, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1966, OCLC 604141820, p. 226.
  7. ↑ Oechslin, p. 292 (translation there).
  8. ↑ Collins, pp. 306, 316.
  9. ↑ Collins, p. 321.
  10. ↑ Collins, p. 335.
  11. ↑ Collins, pp. 362, 363.
  12. ↑ Collins, p. p. 352.
  13. ↑ Oechslin, p. 291, referring to it as City/Planning/Housing.
  14. ↑ Oechsler, p. 290.
  15. ↑ Oechslin, p. 292; p. 295, note 119.
  16. ↑ Oechslin, p. 291, quoting in translation from "Kritik des Grosstadt-Sanierungs-Planes Le Corbusiers," Der Städtebau (1927) p. 70.

Sources

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 12/3/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.