Ernst May (July 27, 1886, Frankfurt am Main—September 11, 1970, Hamburg) was a German architect and city planner. July 27 is the 208th day (209th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with 157 days remaining. ... 1886 (MDCCCLXXXVI) is a common year starting on Friday (click on link to calendar) // Events January 18 - Modern field hockey is born with the formation of The Hockey Association in England. ... Frankfurt am Main [ˈfraŋkfʊrt] is the largest city in the German state of Hessen and the fifth largest city of Germany. ... September 11 is the 254th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (255th in leap years). ... 1970 (MCMLXX) was a common year starting on Thursday. ... Alster Lake at dusk Hamburg is the second largest city in Germany and with the Hamburg Harbour, its principal port. ...

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. The period of German history from 1919 to 1933 is known as the Weimar Republic (German Weimarer Republik, IPA: []). It is named after the city of Weimar where a national assembly convened to produce a new constitution after the German Monarchy and German Empire were abolished following the nations... Stalinism is a term used to describe a form of authoritarian communist state, much like the political regime of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. ... Magnitogorsk (Russian:Магнитого́рск) is a mining and industrial city by the Ural River in Russia, with one of the largest iron and steel works in the country. ... A stateless person is someone with no state or nationality, usually because the state that gave their previous nationality has ceased to exist and there is no successor state. ... Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, commonly refers to Germany in the years 1933–1945, when it was under the firm control of the totalitarian and fascist ideology of the Nazi Party, with the Führer Adolf Hitler as dictator. ... A satellite composite image of Africa Africa is the worlds second-largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. ...

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. Raymond Unwin was born in Rotherham, Yorkshire but grew up in Oxford after his father sold up his business and moved there to study. ... The Garden city movement was founded by Sir Ebenezer Howard in England in 1898 as an approach to urban planning. ... Munich and the Alps Munich (German: München (pronounced listen) is the largest city and capital of the German Federal State of Bavaria. ... Theodor Fischer (1862 - 1938) was a German architect and teacher who trained both German Bestelmeyer and Paul Bonatz, and belonged to the Munich School to which Paul Troost belonged. ... The Deutscher Werkbund (English: German Association of Craftsmen) was an association of artists, founded in 1907 in München by Hermann Muthesius, promoting innovation in applied arts and architecture through good design and craftmanship. ...

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. Wrocław. ...

the Rundling in the Römerstadt in 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. Image File history File linksMetadata Ernstmay2. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Ernstmay2. ...

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". Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (January 23, 1897 – January 18, 2000) was the first female Austrian architect and an activist in the anti-Nazi resistance movement. ... The Frankfurt kitchen (view from the entrance) The Frankfurt kitchen was a milestone in domestic architecture, considered the fore-runner of modern built-in kitchens, for it realised for the first time a kitchen built after a unified concept, designed to enable efficient work and to be built at low...

May 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 Congrès International dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM) (International Congress of Modern Architecture) (1928 - 1959) was the think tank of the Modern Movement (or International Style) in architecture. ...

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. Mart Stam (1899 - 1986) was a Dutch architect, urban planner, and chair designer. ... Socialism is an ideology of a social and economic system where the means of production are owned and controlled by all of society. ... British East Africa was a British protectorate in East Africa, covering generally the area of present-day Kenya and lasting from 1890 to 1920, when it became the colony of Kenya. ...

The 1995 documentary film Sotsgorod ("Socialist Cities") interviewed some of the last survivors of these groups: Lihotsky, Jan Rutgers, and Phillipp Tolziner of the Bauhaus Brigade, and visited four of the planned cities: Magnitogorsk, Orsk, Novokuznetsk and Kemerov. The city of Orsk is located in the south of the Ural Mountains at the point where the Or and Ural River meet. ... Novokuznetsk (Russian Новокузне́цк, pop. ...

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. Combatants Allied Powers Axis Powers Commanders {{{commander1}}} {{{commander2}}} Strength {{{strength1}}} {{{strength2}}} Casualties 17 million military deaths 7 million military deaths {{{notes}}} World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a mid-20th century conflict that engulfed much of the globe and is accepted as the largest and...

Web Resources

• research on the growth of Magnitogorsk
• Site on May's Frankfurt housing projects (in German)