There are few architects who have either the attack or the independence of Z ,-i Hec~e,. 
In a world where that whiet ~3sses i"r architectural theory seems to be an increasm::h- rex:-:-3Se.:1 2'-oidance of interest in anything that loob L:e .?-:-l·,-JEIlg. ,ha;: which passes for architectural discussion :s lcc.?-l C': ;cc-afessional politics dressed-up as architectural F'si::,TLing, and that which passes for architectural style is ,aL.!-}er graphical, one relishes in the sheer old-fashioned power of Hecker's work. His attack comes from the heart, the brain and the pencil simultaneously. He will not be hustled into ready formulae and repetitive gambitry. 
Thus a Hecker building has to take a certain amount of time, though it may have won a competition (like the Berlin school and the Tel Aviv Palmach museum) and has therefore displayed enough of that power at the first instance: we have only a shadow of the eventual project. A Hecker building has to have a certain amount of his physical presence (ideally living near the site, but if not, howring over it like an anxious parent); it has to have a considerable amount of his caress: for he will subject a plan to endless strokes of the pencil: pushing, pulling, stroking the walls into a nearly preposterous - but still consequent - set of postures. 
His attack is of course to do with concentration and is certainly the product of an object-based architectural culture. His independence is to be observed on several coincident levels. First, an independence from the current fashions: which is not to say that he is uninformed or locked inside the references of his own generation his bookshelves contain the new, his gossip concerns those much younger than himself and he is genuinely international - but he has a suitable and quizzical distance from the drifts of Eisenman, Koolhaas or Ando. He has a useful independence from so-called »Israeli Architecture« which, bearing in mind its provinciality, is absolutely necessary to his creative survival. He has also a fascinating relationship to his own past. In looking at the Danziger Hall which he built at the Haifa Technion with his former teacher, Alfred Neumann, in 1964, I was struck, not so much by its geometrical preoccupations (a too-easy definition of Hecker's earlier work) but by its self-assurance. It shares with Ludwig Leo's Berlin sports hall a very particular role: that of the 

strong, calm ,'warm-up" before unleashing full power. (The two buildings have many similarities of mood, by the way.) 
If Leo's water circulation tank and DLRG station shock and intrigue with a grim audacity, then Hecker's Spiral apartments at Ramat Gan and Jewish School in Berlin shock with an added sense of tease - reflecting terhap the difference in their personalities but linking mem in Lheir shared role of agents-provocateurs and linking them in their positive indifference to the cloying politeness of all that goes on around them. 
\Vhen an objective history of the architecture of the late twentieth century is written, it will probably have more to say about Ralph Erskine, Sverre Fehn, Eric Moss, Gunther Domenig, Itsuko Hasegawa, Clorindo Testa and Imre Makovecz than about their more »networked" contemporaries - for the simple reason that they are all inventors of form and sequence. Hecker has the same boyish quality of Erskine: occasionally falling on a formal banana-skin but picking himself up with the next building, one breakthrough plus one »bummer« being (in my view) far better than two »oh-so-nicers«. Hecker has that same disarming and intelligent charm as Fehn in presenting a description of a piece of poetry with a sweet shrug, knowing that you know that the subject of the shrug was the product of days and days of thinking, scratching, concentrating and revision. Like Fehn he produces shapes that belie categorisation. Like Moss he chooses his details with a certain calculated disdain for the fragile palette of most contemporary onlookers, For Moss' inclined drainpipes read Hecker's jagged swabs of corrugated sheet metal on the Spiral. For Moss' strange fossilisation of the courtyard walls at the Paramount laundry read Hecker's almost insulting veneer or orange »crazy-paving« stonework (again at the Spiral). Like Domenig, he can flip from the topologically virtuoso move to the straight-up-and-down without a shiver. Like Hasegawa he likes to play with the ground and then wrap this same ground with frighteningly memorable iconography: they both indulge (but I use the word positively) in presenting the dayto-day public at a museum or a school or a house with a glimpse of the world outside the limits of the »sensible« and mundane. They are alchemists. Dreamers. Magicians.