Bruno Taut Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Bruno Taut (1880-1938) was a German architect, planner and writer. Before and after the First World War he was a leading visionary of Expressionism, with the faceted Glass Pavilion of 1914 and the utopian drawings of Alpine Architecture. In the 1920s he turned to social housing in Berlin, building colourful estates such as the Horseshoe Estate in Britz that are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He spent his last years in Japan and Turkey.

Königsberg and the Glass Pavilion

Taut was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in 1880 and trained at the building school there before working in Stuttgart under Theodor Fischer. His Glass Pavilion for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne, a prismatic dome of coloured glass built for the glass industry and inspired by the writer Paul Scheerbart, became an icon of Expressionist architecture.

Utopia and the Glass Chain

During and after the war Taut published utopian books including Alpine Architektur (1919) and Die Stadtkrone, and led the Gläserne Kette, a chain of letters among architects such as Hans Scharoun and Wenzel Hablik. From 1921 to 1924 he was city architect of Magdeburg, where he had houses and buildings painted in bright colours.

Housing for Berlin

As chief architect of the housing association GEHAG, Taut designed some 12,000 dwellings in Berlin, among them the Horseshoe Estate in Britz with Martin Wagner (1925-1933) and the Onkel Toms Hütte estate in Zehlendorf. Their gardens, light and strong colours made them models of humane modern housing, and several were listed by UNESCO in 2008.

Japan and Turkey

Under threat from the Nazi regime, Taut left Germany in 1933 for Japan, where he wrote influential books on Japanese architecture and praised the Katsura Imperial Villa. In 1936 he moved to Istanbul to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts and design schools for the Turkish government, including the Faculty of Languages, History and Geography in Ankara. He died in Istanbul in 1938.