On the level of the morphology of the city we come across the symbiosis of
an organic design model and an approach that is based on financial and functional
considerations. The aim of the latter was to see that the four functions of housing,
work, trade, and traffic, which were intertwined in the traditional city, would be sep-
arated. The different activities would in this way be prized loose from their original
context and reassembled in a different relation to each other. Montage and organic
design converge in a concept that preserves the hallmarks of hierarchy and central-
ism, while giving them a different filling-in, so that the different parts of the city be-
come independent.
The master plan for development (Flächenverteilungsplan,figure 23) certainly
attests to an attempt to plan Frankfurt as a single whole. It is going too far, then, to
interpret the Siedlungenas Tafuri does as “islands” in an “anti-urban utopia,” float-
ing isolated in space and linked with the city only in a haphazard fashion.^71 Analysis
of these plans clearly shows that May’s Frankfurt was planned as a coherent spatial
unity consisting of urban areas with different characteristics.
2
Constructing the Modern Movement23 Ernst May and collaborators,
master plan for the development
of the city, 1930.