In the 1920s, the urban theory of Ludwing Hilberseimer (1885-1967) redefined architecture's relationship to the city. His proposal for a High-rise City, where leisure, labor, and circulation would be vertically integrated, both frightened his contemporaries and offered a trenchant critique of the dynamics of the capitalist metropolis. Hilberseimer's "Metropolisarchitecture" is presented here for the first time in English translation. Two additional essays frame this international cross-section of metropolitan architecture: "Der Wille zur Architektur" (The Will to Architecture) and "Vorschlag zur City-Bebauung" (Proposal for City-Center Developement). The propositions assembled here encourage us to reconsider mobility, concentration, and the scale of architectural intervention in our own era of urban expansion.
