Bruno Taut

Bruno Taut'''Bruno Julius Florian Taut''' (May 4, 1880, Konigsberg, Germany - December 24, 1938, Istanbul), was a German architect and urban planner. Bruno Taut was most active in Weimar culture|Weimar Germany. After training in Berlin and joining the office of Theodor Fischer in Stuttgart, Taut opened his own Berlin office in 1910. Best known for theoretical work, speculative writings and a handful of exhibition buildings, Taut produced a surprisingly large number of houses in Berlin as the city's architect. Although variously classified as a Modernism|Modernist and an Expressionism|Expressionist, his social and practical concerns were equally strong. His sketches for "Alpine Architecture" (1917) are the work of an unabashed Utopian visionary. Much of his work in German remains untranslated to English. A lifelong painter, Taut is unique among his European modernist contemporaries in his devotion to color. He applied lively, clashing colors to his first major commission, the 1912 Falkenberg housing estate in Berlin, which became known as the "Paint Box Estates". Taut's best-known single building, the prismatic dome of the Glass Pavilion at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition (1914), familiar from black and white reproduction, was also brightly colored. Taut's distinction from his Modernist contemporaries was never clearer than at the 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung housing exhibition in Stuttgart. As opposed to other pure-white entries from Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius, Taut's house Number 19 was painted up in primary colors, and was not well received by Mies. Taut moved from Germany to the Soviet Union in 1932 to escape the Nazis, to Takasaki in Japan in 1933, where he produced three books on Japanese culture and architecture, and to Turkey in 1936. == External links == * [http://www.archinform.net/projekte/619.htm?ID=OgHQi7byHfGvnJ1t Bruno Taut's dome at the Werkbund Exhibition] Category:Weimar Culture Category:Architects|Taut, Bruno Category:Urban planners|Taut, Bruno Category:1880 births|Taut, Bruno Category:1938 deaths|Taut, Bruno