Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst was a monthly architecture journal published in Berlin by Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, the house best known internationally for its 1910 portfolio of Frank Lloyd Wright's work. Founded in 1914 by the publisher Günther Wasmuth, the journal became one of the most widely read German architectural periodicals of the interwar years, combining richly illustrated reports on new buildings with historical studies, town-planning debates and frequent coverage of architecture abroad, particularly in the United States, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.
Its most distinctive period began in 1924, when the critic and town planner Werner Hegemann became editor alongside Günther Wasmuth, with Leo Adler (1927–1928) and Hans Josef Zechlin (from 1929) as managing editors. Hegemann, author of Das steinerne Berlin (1930), used the journal as a platform for polemical, often contrarian criticism: sceptical of avant-garde manifestos, attentive to housing and the planned city, and openly engaged with American civic design. In 1930 the journal absorbed Der Städtebau, the town-planning journal founded in 1904 by Camillo Sitte and Theodor Goecke, and continued as Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau.
In 1932 the journal was taken over by the Berlin Bauwelt-Verlag and renamed Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau. After the National Socialist seizure of power, Hegemann, an outspoken opponent of the regime, left Germany in 1933 and died in New York in 1936. The journal continued under new editorship until it was discontinued in 1942. Its later volumes document the architecture and planning of the Third Reich and should be read in that context.
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2,886 buildings and projects have been extracted from the issues; a selection is listed here, each opening the issue at its page. See all 2,886 projects in the project directory.
The main editors and publishers of the journal, as printed in its mastheads and documented in library catalogues.
Publisher who founded the journal in 1914 and was responsible for its editing in the early years; co-editor with Werner Hegemann from 1924.
Critic, town planner and historian; shaped the journal's interwar profile; went into exile in 1933.
Architect and theorist.
Succeeded Leo Adler; remained in charge of the editorial office after the move to Bauwelt-Verlag in 1932.
Editor of the Städtebau section from 1933 and editor-in-chief by 1936, with Hans Josef Zechlin as his deputy, until the journal was discontinued in 1942.
Founded by the Berlin architecture and art publisher Ernst Wasmuth; taken over by the Bauwelt-Verlag, Berlin, in 1932.
Selected scholarship on the journal, and the institutional sources from which the database draws its scans and transcripts.
The reproductions were digitized by Phoebus Panigyrakis from original volumes held at the saai Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau, Karlsruhe, during a research fellowship supported by the Wüstenrot Stiftung. Additional issues were sourced from the digital collections of the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin (ZLB), whose librarians kindly approved their inclusion in the database as public-domain material. The scans were edited into PDF booklets (cropping, rotation and page corrections) by Ines Rulence, processed for Character Recognition, and published as flipbooks.
Issues of Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst published before 1931 are in the public domain in the United States. Under EU law (Directive 2006/116/EC), the journal as a collective work is in the public domain, as more than 70 years have elapsed since its last issue (1942). However, individually authored contributions may carry separate protection: texts, drawings and photographs by authors who died after 1955 may remain under copyright in the EU. The Architectural Periodicals Database does not assert ownership of the original creative content, only of the database itself. This material is republished here for educational and research purposes as part of a non-profit archive. If you are a rights holder and believe your work has been used without appropriate permission, please contact us at info@architecturalperiodicals.com.