Ernst May (27 July 1886 – 11 September 1970) was a German architect and city planner. May successfully applied urban design techniques to the city of Frankfurt am Main during the Weimar Republic period, and in 1930 less successfully exported those ideas to Soviet Union cities, newly created under Stalinist rule. It is said May's "brigade" of German architects and planners established twenty cities in three years, including Magnitogorsk. May's travels left him stateless when the Nazis seized power in Germany, and he spent many years in African exile before returning to Germany near the end of his life. Life May was born in Frankfurt am Main, the son of a leather goods manufacturer. His education from 1908 through 1912 included time in the United Kingdom, studying under Raymond Unwin, and absorbing the lessons and principles of the garden city movement. He finished a study at the Technical University of Munich, working with Friedrich von Thiersch and Theodor Fischer, a co-founder of the Deutscher Werkbund. Working for himself and others through the 1910s, in 1921 he helped win a competition for rural housing estate developments in Breslau. His concepts of decentralized planning, some of which had been imported from the garden city movement, he won the job of city architect and planner for his home city from 1925 through 1930. Working under Mayor Ludwig Landmann, the position gave him broad powers of zoning, financing, and hiring. There was copious funding and an available labor pool. He used them. The New Frankfurt In the context of a housing shortage and a degree of political instability, May assembled a powerful staff of progressive architects and initiated the large-scale housing development program New Frankfurt. May's developments were remarkable for the time for being compact, semi-independent, well-equipped with community elements like playgrounds, schools, theatres, and common washing areas. For the sake of economy and construction speed May used simplified, prefabricated forms. These settlements are still marked by their functionality and the way they manifest egalitarian ideals such as equal access to sunlight, air, and common areas. Of these settlements the best known is probably Siedlung Römerstadt, and some of the structures are colloquially known as Zickzackhausen (zig-zag houses). In 1926 May sent for Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky to join him in Frankfurt. Lihotzky was a kindred spirit and applied the same sort of functional clarity to household problems, and so in Frankfurt, after much