Taut, Bruno

(1880-1938)

   architect; with Walter Gropius,* chiefly re-sponsible for enhancing awareness of the social significance of architecture. Born to a struggling merchant in Konigsberg, he studied at Konigsberg's Bau-gewerkschule before transferring in 1903 to Berlin.* After four years with Stutt-gart's Theodor Fischer, he opened a Berlin office in 1909 with Franz Hoffmann; his younger brother Max (1884-1967) joined the firm in 1914. He gained notice in 1912 for his design of garden cities for the suburbs of Magdeburg and Berlin, and by the time war broke out he was already a respected industrial and resi-dential architect. He was long attracted to Expressionism*; his pavilion at Leip-zig's 1913 building exhibition and his beehive-shaped "Glashaus" at Cologne's 1914 Werkbund exposition placed him at the center of the modernist movement. A pacifist, he was dismissed by the military review board in 1914.

   Taut was a born organizer with a sense of mission. In November 1918 he founded, with Gropius, the painter Cesar Klein, and the critic Adolf Behne, the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst,* a group focused on uniting "art and the people." He also joined the Novembergruppe.* As the leader of architecture s utopian wing, he published the influential magazine supplement Fruhlicht (Dawn). But with his visionary penchant ebbing, he served during 1921-1924 as Magdeburg s city architect. Gehag (Gemeinnutzige Heimstatten-Aktiengesellschaft), Berlin's hous-ing cooperative, recruited him in 1924 as its designer and thus initiated the most productive phase of his career. The same year he helped organize the Ring,a group of architects hoping to enliven housing policy in the capital. Under Taut s direction Gehag focused on large-scale apartment projects in Berlin s suburbs (Neukolln and Zehlendorf); the best-known, built with Martin Wagner during 1925-1930, was the "horseshoe" development in Britz. In all, he mobilized the construction of over ten thousand apartments.

   Taut's significance lies less in his buildings than in his published thought. His prolific writings raised issues of common concern, provoked discussion of the "new architecture, and extended modernism s boundaries. All of his work made reference to light and crystal (e.g., Alpine Architecture, 1919). Elected in 1931 to the Prussian Academy of Arts, he taught during 1930-1932 at Berlin s Technische Hochschule and then went to Moscow as consulting architect to the city government. Dismayed by Soviet efforts to discourage modernism, he came home in February 1933 to learn that the Nazis sought his arrest as a cultural Bolshevik (see Kulturbolschewismus). He fled Germany and spent three years in Japan at the request of the Japanese Society of Architects. In his final years he taught at Istanbul s art academy.

   REFERENCES:Lane, Architecture and Politics; Macmillan Encyclopedia ofArchitects; Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture; Dennis Sharp, Modern Architecture and Expression-ism.