Ernst May

Born July 27, 1886, in Frankfurt am Main; died Sept. 11, 1970, in Hamburg. German architect.

Between 1910 and 1920 May studied at the Technische Hochschule in Munich under T. Fischer. In addition to Germany he worked in the USSR (1930-33) and East Africa (1934 to the early 1950’s). As chief architect of Frankfurt am Main (1925-30), he was among the first in Western Europe to put the principles of rationalism into practice in large-scale construction (settlements near the city, such as Bruchfeldstrasse and Praunheim). May’s underlying principles of urban construction were the decentralization of cities—that is, the creation of a system of satellite towns around the historical center (the unrealized project of the reconstruction of Moscow, 1931-33) and the standardization and mass production of housing (the unrealized general plan for Magnitogorsk, 1930-33). In the late 1940’s and the 1950’s, May abandoned the rigidness of the plans that he had developed in the 1920’s and 1930’s, replacing the principle of linear construction with freer spatial compositions (the settlements of Neue Altona and Griinhof in the Hamburg vicinity, 1954-55).