Located on the Main River at the edge of western Germany’s densely populated Rhein-Main industrial area, Frankfurt is the capital of the German state of Hesse and one of Europe’s most important banking, commercial, industrial, and transportation centers. It began the 20th century as a province of Prussia under the guidance of Mayor Franz Adickes (1846–1915), who initiated a series of reform-minded urban-planning policies. Before World War I, visitors and professionals from the nascent field of urban planning flocked to admire Frankfurt’s new streets, boulevards, parks, housing projects, public transit system, sanitation, and land development schemes. The unique brand of municipal socialism created by Adickes gave the city government broad powers to create a beautiful and well-ordered city that planning officials throughout Germany, England, and the United States envied and sought to copy.

Despite these reforms, Frankfurt, like most other German (indeed European) cities, suffered a tremendous housing shortage at the end of World War I in 1918. Although some remedial reforms were implemented immediately after the war, major improvements did not come until the enactment of the Dawes Plan and the infusion of American money and loans in 1923 and the election of Social Democrat Ludwig Landmann as mayor in 1924. Landmann further reorganized the city government and the tax laws to allow for more efficient planning and construction of housing and public works and hired the young architect Ernst May from Breslau in Silesia to take control of all building and construction departments in the city. Although May did not solve the housing crisis he inherited, he initiated an unprecedented program of innovative research, planning, and construction that once again drew the attention and participation of many of the Europe’s leading architects and planners.

May’s program called for the greater part of the population to live in a series of new decentralized satellite cities clustered around the old city core, to which they would be connected with high-speed roads and public transit. Based on older ideas of the Garden City movement that May had learned as a student of Raymond Unwin in England, the new housing estates provided high-density low-rise housing for middle-income workers both in large blocks and in long row houses. Whereas early satellites developments such as Bruchfeldstrasse (1926–27, E. May), Römerstadt (1927–28, E. May), and Praunheim (1927–29, E. May) were often laid out with more traditional curved streets and courtyards, the latter ones, such as Westhausen (1929–30, E. May), Hellerhof (1929, M. Stam), and Am Lindenbaum (1930, W. Gropius), were laid out in rigid, uniform rows oriented north to south to maximize the solar orientation of each apartment and allow for greater standardization of building components.

To realize his ambitious plans, May reorganized the municipal construction industry, making the process faster, cheaper, and better. Through the help of some national building research grants (RFG), he rationalized the municipal production of materials and standardized building components, including the lightweight, prefabricated-concrete panels that were assembled into cubic, flat-roofed housing. May and his team, including Grete Schütte-Lihotsky, Martin Elsässer, Adolf Meyer, Emil Kaufmann, and Ferdinand Kramer, worked hard to define an “existence minimum”—the optimal and most efficient apartment layout for a given family size. The floor plans, the furnishings, and especially the “Frankfurt Kitchens” were completely redesigned and mass produced according to the latest American efficiency theories of C.Frederick, Frederick Taylor, and Henry Ford in order to minimize costs and work for the housewife. The resulting “New Building” was, like engineering, striving to be completely objective, rational, and efficient not only in its construction system but also in its aesthetic and social organization. The housing program was complemented by an ambitious school-building program, new libraries, parks and recreation areas, new wholesale markets and electrical substations, and the implementation of a whole series of social and cultural reforms to help transform Frankfurt into a more modern home of the proverbial “New Man.” May publicized Frankfurt’s reforms in the avant-garde magazine Das neue Frankfur t (The New Frankfurt), which circulated the innovative ideas to Europe, the United States, Japan, and the rest of the world. Frankfurt’s successes led the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) holding its second congress in Frankfurt to inspect, admire, and share May’s achievement of building over 10,000 new apartments in five years. Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and many other avant-garde architects of the Modern movement marveled at the new housing, infrastructure, advertising graphics, and schools in the “New Frankfurt” and modeled many new standards on the Frankfurt prototypes.

In 1930, May and his team of architects left Frankfurt because of increasing pressure from Germany’s radical right, who labeled May’s modern brand of architecture “Bolshevik” and unGerman. They went to the Soviet Union, where they had even greater experimental planning projects. Construction on the “New Frankfurt” continued until 1933, when Hitler’s Nazi regime took over political power of Germany and championed a more traditional, handcrafted, pitched-roof architecture. Although architectural development slowed, Frankfurt’s banking, transport, and industrial base made it an important center for Nazi wartime production. Two of the world’s largest chemical companies, Hoechst and the former I.G.Farben, makers of the gas used in Nazi concentration camps, had their headquarters in new buildings in Frankfurt, the former in a brick Expressionist building by Peter Behrens (1924), the latter in a monumental, stone- clad, 10-story curved building by Hans Poelzig (1931). After World War II, Poelzig’s office building was used as headquarters for the U.S. Army, and after 1995, it was slowly converted into university facilities. From the fall of 1943 to September 1944 and especially on the night of 22 March 1944, the historic center of Frankfurt was almost completely destroyed by Allied bombings: of 47,500 buildings, fewer than 8000 survived at least in part. After the war, expecting to become the headquarters of Allied occupation forces, Frankfurt’s planners elected to reconstruct their city based primarily on considerations of efficient traffic arteries and large building lots rather than restoring the original medieval city fabric. After rubble removal in the late 1940s, rebuilding started in the 1950s alongside West Germany’s economic recovery. The modern, International Style buildings designed by May’s colleague Ferdinand Kramer as well as well-known younger architects, such as Egon Eiermann, Sep Ruf, and Gottfried Böhm, still dominate downtown Frankfurt. With the relocation of the West German Central Bank to Frankfurt in 1957, the city grew rapidly into the largest banking and stock exchange center of Germany, the home of one of Europe’s largest and architecturally significant convention centers, with exhibit halls by F.V.Thiersch (1907), O.M.Ungers (1984), and Helmut Jahn (1989), and home to Europe’s largest and busiest train station, one of the busiest airports in the world, and some of Germany’s busiest Autobahn crossings.

In the late 1970s, citizens began to demand more spending on cultural affairs and the creation of a more humane cityscape. They voted to restore and reconstruct their war-torn central Römer Square with its surrounding 16th-century merchants’ houses, using traditional half-timber framing techniques. The city also began the creation and construction of a series of worldclass museums, most of which were located on a short stretch of riverbank across from the downtown in the more traditional Sachsenhausen neighborhood. Unger’s German Architecture Museum (1984) and Richard Meier’s Museum of Applied Arts (1985) added on to early 20th-century villas, whereas the German Postal Museum (1990, G.Behnisch), the Museum of Modern Art (1991, H.Hollein), and the Schirn Kunsthalle (1985, D.Bangert, B.Jansen, S.Scholz, and A.Schultes) are completely new structures.

Although the tall banking towers had already earned the city the nicknames “Bankfurt,” “Mainhattan,” and “Chicago on the Main,” during the final decade of the century Frankfurt added a whole series of Europe’s tallest and most innovative new skyscrapers. The trend started with Ungers’ Torhaus (1984) and Jahn’s Messeturm (1991) at the convention center. On the skyline, the blue-glass twin towers of the Deutsche Bank (1984) downtown were soon joined by the DG Bank “Crown” tower (1993) by Kohn Pederson Fox and the Commerzbank Tower (1997) by Sir Norman Foster, which contains large multistory atriums every eight floors with trees to help condition the building’s air. Frankfurt’s recent designation as the home of the European Union’s new central bank has only fueled the construction boom—the Landesbank Hessen is planning a tower by Peter Schweiger, and German Telekom is planning a skyscraper by Richard Rogers. The second “New Frankfurt,” created alongside the new museums and banks, has once again become a fertile ground for architectural innovation and admiration.

KAI K.GUTSCHOW

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.1 (A-F).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2004.

MAY, ERNST;

UNGERS, OSWALD MATHIAS;

1924, IG Farben Dyeworks Headquarters, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

1926, Housing, Kranichsteinerstrasse, Frankfurt, Germany

1926, Hohenblick Siedlung, Frankfurt, Germany

1926, Ernst May House, Frankfurt, Germany

1927, the Zig-Zag housing, Frankfurt, Germany

1928, Mammolshainerstrasse Siedlung, Frankfurt, Germany

1929, Praunheim Seidlung, Frankfurt, Germany

1930, Reidhof-West Siedlung, Frankfurt, Germany

1930, Bornheimerhang Siedlung, Frankfurt, Germany

1932, Tornow-Gelande Siedlung, Frankfurt, Germany

1979-1984, German Architectural Museum, Frankfurt, Germany

1979-1985, Museum for the Decorative Arts, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

1982-1991, MUSEUM MODERNER KUNST, Frankfurt am Main, Germany1983-1984, Torhaus, Frankfurt, Germany

1991, Messe Tower, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany

2001, Frankfurt Trade Fair Hall, Frankfurt, Germany

BERLIN; COLOGNE; DÜSSELDORF; GERMANY; STUTTGART;

FUTHER READING

Kalusche is the best and most up-to-date guidebook to individual buildings. Many studies exist of the “New Building” in Frankfurt in the 1920s, of which Mohr is the most authoritative, and Bullock perhaps the best English summary. Hirdina’s anthology of articles from Das neue Frankfurt provides invaluable contemporary source material. The recent museums and skyscrapers are reviewed in countless architecture periodicals. 

Braun, Helmut, Bauen in Frankfurt am Main seit 1900, Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 1977

Bullock, Nicholas, “Housing in Frankfurt 1925–1931 and the New Wohnkultur,” Architectural Review, vol. 163, 1978

Eisenman, Peter, Unfolding Frankfurt, Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1991

Fehl, Gerhard, “The Niddatal Project: The Unfinished Satellite Town on the Outskirts of Frankfurt,” Built Environment, vol. 9, 1983

Henderson, Susan Rose, “A Setting for Mass Culture: Life and Leisure in the Nidda Valley,” Planning Perspectives, vol. 10, 1995

Hirdina, Heinz (editor), Neues Bauen, neues Gestalten: Das Neue Frankfurt, die neue Stadt, eine Zeitschrift zwischen 1926 und 1933, Berlin: Elefanten, 1984

Jonak, Ulf, Die Frankfurter Skyline: Eine Stadt gerät aus den Fugen und gewinnt an Gestalt, Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1997

Kalusche, Bernd, and Wolf-Christian Setzepfandt, Architekturführer, Frankfurt am Main; Architectural Guide, Frankfurt am Main (bilingual German-English edition), Berlin: Reimer, 1992; 2nd edition, 1997

Ladd, Brian, Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860–1914, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990

Lane, Barbara Miller, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968

Mohr, Christoph, and Michael Müller, Funktionalität und Moderne: Das neue Frankfurt und seine Bauten, 1925–1933, Frankfurt: Fricke, 1984

Prigge, Walter, and Hans-Peter Schwarz (editors), Das Neue Frankfurt: Städtebau und Architektur im Modernisierungsprozess, 1925–1988, Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1988