'Zig-Zag Houses' in Frankfurt
Ernst May (July 27, 1886, Frankfurt am Main—September 11, 1970,
Hamburg) was a German architect and city planner.
May successfully applied urban design techniques to the city of Frankfurt am Main during Germany's Weimar period, and who in 1930 less successfully exported those ideas to Soviet Union cities, newly created under Stalinist rule. It is said
May's "brigade" of German architects and planners established twenty cities in three years, including Magnitogorsk. May's travels left him a stateless person when the
Nazis seized German rule, and he spent many years in African exile before returning to Germany near the end of his life.
Life
May was born as the son of a leather goods manufacturer. His education from 1908 through 1912 included time in the
United Kingdom, studying under Raymond Unwin, and
absorbing the lessons and principles of the garden city movement. He finished with
a study at the Technischen Hochschule in Munich, working with Friedrich
von Thiersch and Theodor Fischer, a co-founder of the Deutscher Werkbund.
Working for himself and others through the 1910s, in 1921 he helped win a competition for rural housing estate developments in
Breslau. His concepts of decentralized planning, some
of which had been imported from the garden city movement, he won the job of city architect and planner for his home city from
1925 through 1930. Working under Mayor Ludwig Landmann, the position gave him broad
powers of zoning, financing, and hiring. There was copious funding and an available labor pool. He used them.
the
Rundling in the Römerstadt in Frankfurt
The New Frankfurt
In the context of a housing shortage and a degree of political instability, May assembled a powerful staff of progressive
architects and initiated a large-scale housing development program. May's developments were remarkable for the time for being
compact, semi-independent, well-equipped with community elements like playgrounds, schools, theatres, and common washing areas.
For the sake of economy and construction speed May used simplified, prefabricated forms. These settlements are still marked by
their functionality and the way they manifest egalitarian ideals such as equal access to sunlight, air, and common areas. Of
these settlements the best known is probably Römerstadt, and some of the structures are
colloquially known as Zickzackhausen.
In 1926 May sent for Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky to join him in Frankfurt. Lihotsky was a kindred spirit and
applied the same sort of functional clarity to household problems, and so in Frankfurt, after much analysis of work habits and
footsteps, she developed the prototype of the modern installed kitchen, and pursued
her idea that "housing is the organized implementation of living habits".
May's Frankfurt was a civic and critical success. This has been described (by John R. Mullin) as "one of the most remarkable
city planning experiments in the twentieth century". In two years May produced more than 5000 building units, up to 15,000 units
in five years, published his own magazine (Zeitschrift Das Neue Frankfurt) and in 1929 won international attention at the
Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne. This also
brought him to the attention of the Soviet Union.
The 'May Brigade' in the USSR
In 1930 May took virtually his entire Frankfurt staff to Russia. May's Brigade amounted to a task force of 17 people,
including Lihotsky, her husband Wilhelm Schuette, the Swiss Hans Schmidt, and the Dutch Mart Stam. The promise of the "Socialist paradise" was still fresh, and
May's Brigade and other groups of western planners had the hope of constructing entire cities. The first was to be Magnitogorsk.
Although May's group is indeed credited with building 20 cities in three years, the reality was that May found Magnitogorsk
already under construction and the town site dominated by the mine. Officials were indecisve, then distrustful, corruption and
delay frustrated their efforts, and May himself made misjudgements about the climate. May's contract expired in 1933, and he left
for British East Africa (Kenya). Some of his
architects found themselves unwanted by Russia, and stateless.
The 1995 documentary film Sotsgorod ("Socialist Cities") interviewed some of the last survivors of these groups:
Lihotzky, Jan Rutgers, and Phillipp Tolziner of the Bauhaus Brigade, and visited four of the
planned cities: Magnitogorsk, Orsk, Novokuznetsk and
Kemerov.
May worked, farmed and completed some architectural work in Kenya, then returned to Germany after the end of World War II. From 1954 through 1956 he led the planning department in Hamburg, was involved in several
large housing projects in other cities, and died in 1970.
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