Ernst May was a leading architect and urban planner during the years of the Weimar Republic in Germany. He received his education in London, Darmstadt, and Munich and worked for some years in the town-planning office of Raymond Unwin. After World War I, he was first involved in the planning of Breslau. In 1925, he was appointed Stadtbaurat (government building surveyor) in his native city of Frankfurt. As the head of the department of housing as well as city planning, May succeeded in building an impressive 15,000 housing units in the space of only a few years.

May was one of the most important figures of the early years of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). He belonged to the group of founding members who met in La Sarraz in 1928, and he was responsible for the proposal to hold the second congress in Frankfurt in 1929. Frankfurt was indeed most appropriate for a discussion of the Existenz-minimum dwelling—the theme of the second congress. The housing units in the new settlements were designed as minimal-space apartments or houses that, thanks to their functional design and their fine equipment such as built-in kitchens and bathrooms, offered very agreeable housing for a part of the population that hitherto had been forced to live in slum conditions.

In the aftermath of the economic crisis of 1929, the financial means for the housing program in the Weimar Republic sharply diminished, and May left Germany for the USSR. He became the head of one of the building brigades that was to plan the new industrial towns, including Magnitogorsk, Stseglovsk, and others. Few of the manifold plans they made were realized as the architects had foreseen, and after a few years, their presence became politically embarrassing for their hosts, since the official outlook on architecture and the city became unfavorable toward modern ideas.

In 1945, May returned to Germany (after a long stay in Africa), where he was further involved in the planning of new settlements, such as Neu-Altona. These settlements were far less successful than the ones he designed in Frankfurt in the 1920s. In order to reach high densities, he gave in to the pressure to build high-rises instead of single-family homes or apartment buildings of fewer stories. The clearly demarcated urban spaces and the elegant layout of his Frankfurt settlements gave way to much larger and monotonous quarters where the organization of the traffic was ultimately the determining factor of the design.

May is thus remembered best for the exemplary housing program he set up in Frankfurt between 1925 and 1931. Every caret resident in the conurbation obtained a new dwelling through this program. The new settlements were all situated in a concentric ring enveloping the existing city of Frankfurt, with a large green belt separating the older parts from the new developments. May designed the overall plan for Frankfurt according to the principle of the Trabantenstadt (Satellite town), May's interpretation of Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin's principle of the Garden City. Unlike the English examples, however, which tend to be situated quite a distance from the existing city, May's satellites are integrated into the Frankfurt urban complex. The city of Frankfurt remains a whole, with the greenbelt acting as a complex of city parks rather than a nonurban area situated between the nucleus of the city and the Trabanten (Satellite).

The publication of a monthly magazine aimed at an international readership, titled Das neue Frankfurt (1925-31; The New Frankfurt), promoted the vast construction program. The name of the magazine came to stand for the whole enterprise in which May announced the emergence of a new, unified, and homogeneous metropolitan culture. May prioritized rationality and functionality. Das neue Frankfurt anticipated a rationally organized and communal society of people with shared common interests. This distant ideal and the concrete housing needs of Frankfurt combined to form the basic tenets of housing policy in the city. In this endeavor, the architects of the New Frankfurt gave priority to the industrialization and good design of the construction process in the use of space. They experimented with forms of prefabrication and Plattenbau (panel construction). Grethe Schütte-Lihotzky developed the famous Frankfurt kitchen, which became a standard part of new housing units.

The Siedlung (housing development) of Römerstadt (1927—29) is the most famous and convincing example of May’s city planning. The basic idea was to make good use of the qualities of the landscape; the development follows the contours of the hillside in the form of terraces, while it is related to the valley of the Nidda by viewpoints on the bastions that punctuate the retaining wall between the Siedlung and the valley. There is a clear hierarchy with a main street (the Hadrianstrasse), residential streets, and paths inside the blocks, a hierarchy that the architecture accentuates. The difference between the public front and the private back of the dwellings is emphasized by the neat design of the entrance section on the front, which features a canopy over the front door and a design that prevents passers-by from peering in. The blocks are no longer closed like the 19th-century type. By staggering the long straight streets at the height of the bastions, long monotonous sightlines are avoided. Römerstadt is a superb combination of organic design principles that bear the imprint of the Garden City tradition, with the sensation of simultaneity and movement created by the dynamism of a new, modern architectural idiom.

Hilde HEYNEN 

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.