47Human willpower alone will never bring about a new development. De-
liberate measures, however, can smooth the way and accelerate the
tempo. This is the aim of the monthly magazine Das Neue Frankfurt.
The point of departure is the design of the organism of the metropolis,
with particular reference to its economic foundations. But the magazine
will widen its coverage to include every domain that is relevant to the
designing of a new unified metropolitan culture.^56“Modernity” for May thus meant the creation of a new unified metropolitan culture.
A notion like this clearly implies the dominance of a programmatic concept of moder-
nity. Rationality and functionality were the qualities that were given first priority. “Ra-
tionality” in this context should be interpreted in a broad sense: what May and his
associates had in mind was a culture that anticipated a future society, rationally or-
ganized and conflict-free, made up of people with equal rights and common inter-
ests.^57 This distant ideal and the concrete housing needs of Frankfurt combined to
form the basic tenets of housing policy in this city.
In this endeavor the architects of Das Neue Frankfurtgave priority to the in-
dustrialization of the construction process and the principles of Taylorism in the use
of space:^58 they were apparently convinced that the “rational” character of these
technologies developed in the context of the capitalist system did not conflict with
the “rationality” of the society they had in mind—a society based on equal rights and
homogeneity. The purpose of the Frankfurt experiment fitted perfectly in the scheme
of the optimistic, pastoral ideology of Enlightenment that took the view that
“progress” was the result of an increasing rationality at all levels of life and of soci-
ety. In this scheme of things, the social aspect occupied a prominent place: it was
the deliberate aim of May and his team to ensure that the housing needs of the poor
and the underprivileged were alleviated, as one aspect of the increasing emancipa-
tion of all individuals. For this reason it fits perfectly into what Habermas describes
as “the modern project.” In any case, the aim was to harness the achievements of
avant-garde artists and developments in the field of technology for the actual (archi-
tectural) design of the daily lives of a large portion of the population.
The emancipation May and his associates had in mind was not purely a ma-
terial one; it also implied the enhancement of the culture of everyday life. The aim
was to increase people’s awareness of the positive aspects and new possibilities of
an epoch in which the results of the industrial revolution affected every part of daily
life. The new architecture would have to be consistent with the new conditions of
that life:The achievements of the twentieth century that surround our everyday
existence have given a completely new form to our lives and have had
a fundamental influence on our way of thinking. For reasons such as
this it is becoming increasingly clear that in its design and construction,
housing too will have to undergo changes similar to those that led from46