Frankfurt am Main is celebrating the centennial of "Neue Frankfurt" (New Frankfurt), a revolutionary urban development program that achieved unprecedented influence for modern architecture in Germany. This fall marks 100 years since the ambitious social and cultural transformation of the city began, creating a legacy that continues to shape urban planning today.
While the New Building movement in Germany and the architectural avant-garde of the Weimar Republic manifested in various locations - from the small northern German town of Celle to the metropolis of Berlin, and through model settlements in Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, and Breslau - nowhere did the ideas of modernism achieve such widespread impact as in Frankfurt am Main. This year, Dessau is also celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus move from Weimar, but Frankfurt's comprehensive approach to urban modernization remains unmatched in its scope and influence.
The transformation began in 1925 when Mayor Ludwig Landmann, leading a left-liberal coalition government of the German Democratic Party, SPD, and Center Party, appointed architect Ernst May to Frankfurt. As city building director with far-reaching powers, May was responsible for all areas of municipal construction and was personally involved as a designer in most major projects - a level of authority that would be unthinkable in today's administration.
May, well-connected in architectural circles, brought talented colleagues to Frankfurt who either found positions in the building authority or were entrusted with individual construction projects. Under May's leadership, a total of 12,000 new apartments were completed by 1930, despite increasingly difficult economic times. The global economic crisis from 1929 gradually brought construction in the Main metropolis to a standstill. In 1930, May moved to Moscow with a number of professional colleagues to help build the young Soviet Union.
The leadership team of New Frankfurt consisted of Landmann as the politically responsible figure, May as chief architect, and Bruno Asch as city treasurer. This program encompassed far more than housing construction, ultimately aiming for nothing less than the social and cultural redesign of the city. This comprehensive vision is reflected in the thematically diverse issues of the magazine "Das Neue Frankfurt," published between 1926 and 1933.
Until now, public perception has focused primarily on Ernst May and his residential buildings. In 2011, the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt organized a monographic exhibition on the architect and urban planner's work. In 2019, on the occasion of the Bauhaus anniversary year, it devoted attention to the settlements. This fall, as Frankfurt celebrates 100 years of New Frankfurt, different aspects are being emphasized.
The most important exhibition is being shown at the Museum of Applied Arts under the title "Yes, we care" with the subtitle "The New Frankfurt and the Question of the Common Good." Divided into four chapters, it addresses education, health, social welfare, and household and living. May promoted standardization, including in home furnishings. Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen, which was installed as standard in the new buildings and enabled efficient and time-saving work in seven square meters.
The New Frankfurt program was not limited to apartments and settlement construction but also included schools, kindergartens, libraries, care facilities, swimming pools, and sports facilities. However, much remained unrealized due to the circumstances of the times; only one of the community houses planned for many settlements was actually built. The exhibition makers pay special attention to women's education, including the reform school Loheland, located about 100 kilometers from Frankfurt, where women were trained as gymnastics teachers or craftswomen.
In the neighboring room of the museum, the exhibition "What was the New Frankfurt?" can be seen, designed to provide basic information on the topic. Simple questions and short answers are displayed on wooden slat frames in today's popular craft aesthetic. The approach doesn't aim for depth, and visitors can view the scenography and content as either accessible or banal. However, it's important to know that despite all efforts to standardize housing construction and make it cost-effective, the New Frankfurt buildings were ultimately too expensive for working-class families.
The Jewish Museum, located diagonally across on the other side of the Main, is dedicated to a series of mini-presentations about actors and actresses of New Frankfurt. Many of them were of Jewish origin but understood themselves as secular, including May, Landmann, and Asch.
The best impression of the scope of New Frankfurt can be gained by visiting the numerous buildings that still shape the cityscape today. A tour easily conducted by public transport can begin north of the city center at the Henry and Emma Budge Home (1928-30), a former Jewish-Christian retirement home designed by Dutchman Mart Stam together with Zurich avant-garde architect Werner Max Moser and Ferdinand Kramer, who worked in Frankfurt. This building is considered an icon of New Building.
Nearby are the entrance buildings of the New Jewish Cemetery by Fritz Nathan (1929), a composition that is both monumental and simple, featuring cubic structures of dark clinker brick grouped around an access courtyard. Using the subway, which runs largely above ground here, visitors can reach Römerstadt in the far north of the city area. The then largely unsettled valley of the Nidda River - the former Roman settlement Nida gave the settlement its name - offered sufficient space for a satellite city with 1,200 apartments.
The staggered residential rows, partly single-family row houses and partly multi-story residential buildings, are impressively integrated into the south-facing slope. A row house is accessible as a two-story museum apartment, where visitors can gain a vivid impression of how revolutionary the interior design with Frankfurt Kitchen, simple standard furniture, and bold color schemes must have seemed at the time. The rear garden served for self-sufficiency, while residents of the multi-family blocks had allotment gardens in front of the settlement.
Walls and bastions separate the Römerstadt settlement area from the Nidda. May's pre-World War I engagement with the garden city idea in England becomes more tangible here than in any other settlement. In stark contrast is Westhausen, slightly further southwest, also on the edge of the Nidda valley. This was the last project May was able to realize in Frankfurt, completed in 1931, featuring residential blocks in the form of uniform rows with spacing determined by efficient construction logistics.
On the way back to the city, a visit to the former IG Farben building, now part of Goethe University, is worthwhile. Hans Poelzig won the competition for the monumental administrative building clad in travertine - a breathtaking New Objectivity office palace of the early 20th century, completed in 1930, though it met with little approval from the protagonists of New Frankfurt.
Nearby stands the Palmengarten Society House. In 1929, the historicist hall was provided with a new head building by Martin Elsaesser, demonstrating how simple, beautiful, and festive the architecture of classical modernism can appear. That same year, 1929, the 2nd CIAM Congress took place here. The International Congresses of Modern Architecture, founded in 1928 in La Sarraz, Switzerland, were considered the most important international forum for modern architecture. Ernst May brought the congress to Frankfurt, with the theme "The Dwelling for the Minimum Existence." However, despite all efforts, New Frankfurt ultimately failed to achieve this goal.
The "Yes, we care" exhibition runs until January 11, 2026, at the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt, with an accompanying publication from Spector Books. The centennial celebrations offer a comprehensive look at one of the most ambitious urban planning experiments of the 20th century, highlighting both its achievements and limitations in creating affordable modern housing and reshaping urban life.
