ABSTRACT
The way in which "man" became a rhetorical tool in a dispute that revolved around capital and building material foreshadows two sides of the same coin called "modernism"—modernism in its corporate form which it would be, after yet another war, re-imported into Europe; and modernism as the struggle to provide solutions for dwelling at a minimal level. America, after all, was the place from where the history of modernist architecture would be written, with the re-importation of a corporate high-rise modernism into Europe after the Second World War. The exhibition Modern Architecture at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1932 granted May's Frankfurt Siedlungen a prominent place next to other contemporary housing estates such as the Garden City Radburn in New Jersey or J. J. P. Oud's Kiefhoek development in Rotterdam. The event was to shape the contemporary view of what "modernism" was and it proved to be seminal for its international historiography.
