Expresionism and Modernity, Bruno Taut

We believe that the direct environment of a home is of great importance for the home itself, as it can increase or reduce your well-being and comfort.

Also known as Bruno Julius Florian Taut, he is an architect born in Prussia on May 4, 1880.

Bruno Taut (1880-1938) attended the Konigsberg Construction School until 1901 and subsequently worked in different architectural firms, for example in 1902 for Fabry in Wiesbaden, a year later for Bruno Möhring in Berlin and between 1904 and 1908 for Theodor Fischer in Stuttgart.

In 1908 he received his first commission from him, a turbine hall at Wetter on the Ruhr. With Franz Hoffmann as a partner, he opened his own architecture office a year later, in which his brother Max Taut would also work later.

In 1909, a nursing home was built for the Siemens company in Bad Harzburg. As a director of the Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft, Taut also made the plans for the garden districts of Reform in Magdeburg (1913-1921) and Am Falkenberg in Berlin-Grünau (1912-1915), which were however only partially carried out.

The recognition came to him above all for two exhibition buildings: for the Leipzig Construction Exhibition of 1913 he built the pavilion of the German Association of Steelworks and the pavilion of the German Association of Bridge and Railway Factories; The latter, also called a monument to iron, was an octagonal steel skeleton that was narrowing towards the top of its four levels like a telescope.

For the 1914 Cologne Werkbund Exposition, Taut designed the Glass Industry pavilion with a dome made up of rhomboidal sections of colored glass.

After the war he published expressionist architectural utopias – Alpine Architecture (1918), Die Stadtkrone (1919) – and wrote articles for the magazine Frühlicht, of which he later co-edited.

Under his leadership the Arbeitsrat für Kunst was founded in 1918 and in 1919 the Crystal Chain, a circle of artists and architects, whose members communicated through so-called chain letters.

In the years 1921-1923, Taut was a Magdeburg town planning architect and caused controversial discussions with his concepts of brightly colored façades.

As a director of the non-profit society Heimstätten, Spar und Bau-Aktiengesellschaft from Berlin, he dealt between 1924-1932 on questions concerning mass housing construction.

Among the most important works of that time are the Britz horseshoe-shaped housing estate in Berlin, which he carried out between 1925-1930 together with Martin Wagner, as well as the housing estate called Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Berlin-Zehlendorf (1926-1931).

 In 1926 he was appointed a member of the Der Ring architects association.

In 1927 he participated in the Stuttgart Werkbund Exhibition and he was a professor in the years 1930-1932 at the University of Berlin-Charlottenburg.

1933, Taut moved to Moscow; he eventually emigrated to Japan, where he worked at the Sendai Research Institute. In 1936 he was the successor of Hans Poelzig, who died before taking up the post of professor at the Istanbul Fine Arts Academy.

Gössel, P. (2007). The A-Z of Modern Architecture (Vol. 1). Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.

https://www.urbipedia.org/hoja/Bruno_Taut