Housing the Masses and the New Housing Culture: New Frankfurt Housing Programme, 1925-1931

In the post-war period, European cities – especially in countries such as Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, where social democratic governments were in power – witnessed the realization of social housing programs in order to meet the housing needs of non-privileged classes. One of the most comprehensive applications of these housing programs was Das Neue Frankfurt (New Frankfurt) social housing program, led by Ernst May in Frankfurt. Within the scope of the program that started in 1925 and ended in 1931, Ernst May and his team designed and built approximately 15,000 housing units in order to provide housing for low-income residents. In the end, although the program was insufficient to meet the ever-increasing housing need, these projects have influenced modern residential architecture as being important architectural experiments in which he basic principles of modern architecture - standardization, rationalization and functionality – has been researched and realized. In this paper, the responses of the Das Neue Frankfurt to the problem of housing of the modern people were discussed both on the scale of settlement and the scale of housing unit through the concepts of functionality, rationalization, standardization, mass-production and minimum housing.