Highrise City (Hochhausstadt): Perspective View: North-South Street

One of the central components of architect and planner Ludwig Hilberseimer’s treatise on urban planning of 1924 was a vertically integrated high-rise city where residents would live and work in one seamless unit, traveling up to apartments and down to factories in elevators. These drawings underscore the impersonal nature of Hilberseimer’s imagined society, removed from all identifying markers of history or geography. Although Hilberseimer would later renounce this project, the images remain as powerful expressions of modern architects’ preoccupation with functionalist models for urban society.