The work of the German architect and urban planner, Ludwig K. Hilberseimer (1885-1967), has lately been object of different publi- cations. The research and publications made about his work are quite different among each other. Some authors focus on the 20’s and 30’s periods, before he went to U.S. at the age of 53. Others concentrate his analysis on the time he was teaching at the ITT in Chicago, espe- cially on Hilberseimer Decentralized City proposed for Chicago and Detroit. What is interesting is the fact how the Decentralized City, developed at the ITT School, was a large research process that began before his trip to America in 1938.

Through these pages we trace the line of this research, the forces that shaped it and how strongly this was connected to his most known project, the High Rise City, although they had different approaches and context, the High Rise City was developed for an industrial soci- ety, and Hilberseimer Decentralized City was developed in a transi- tion from industrial to a post- industrial era, they share similar con- cepts.