Stam became one of the 20 architects and urban planners organized by Frankfurt city planner Ernst May who traveled together to the Soviet Union to create a string of new modernist cities in the Stalinist Soviet Union, including Magnitogorsk. The May Brigade included Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, her husband Wilhelm Schütte, Arthur Korn, Erich Mauthner and Hans Schmidt. Stam was there in February 1931 to participate in the struggle to build rational worker housing from the ground up, an effort ultimately defeated by adverse weather, corruption, and poor design decisions. Stam moved to planning activities in Makeyevka in Ukraine in 1932, then to Orsk, with his friend Hans Schmidt (again) and with Bauhaus student and future wife Lotte Beese, then to the copper-mining Soviet city of Balgash. Stam returned to the Netherlands in 1934. Return to the Netherlands and World War II Between 1934 and 1948 Stam attempted to gain a foothold in his home country again. From 1934 Stam cultivated a friendship with the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Willem Sandberg, which leads to job opportunities and creative commissions. He became part of the editorial board of the New Objectivity journal De 8 and Opbouw (The 8 and Construction, (literally: Building Up). In the year 1935/36 he works at the office of Willem van Tijen, prominent Dutch modernist architect. He self-initiates a row of five drive-in houses with his wife Lotte Beese and van Tijen in Amsterdam South, once again exploring the expression of mobility in an innovative manner. Enters various design competitions, amongst others for the City Hall of Amsterdam (with W. van Tijen, H.A. Maaskant and L. Stam-Beese), which garners praise from Le Corbusier., and the Dutch Pavilion for the 1939 World Exhibition in New York. Although Stam won this invited competition, the project went to the traditionalist architect D.F. Slothouwer, who was friends with the government official overseeing the Dutch contribution. This in spite of protests from the Dutch art community and the director of MoMA, Alfred Barr. In 1939, upon referral of Sandberg, Stam becomes director of the Instituut voor Kunstnijverheidsonderwijs, IvKNO in Amsterdam (Institute for Applied Arts, and the predecessor to the current Rietveld Academy). During the Nazi occupation Mart Stam uses his position at the school to employ activities in the Dutch resistance. Divorces his second wife Lotte-Beese in 1943 and marries Olga Heller in 1946, a Jewish employee at the