29 Facts About Bruno Taut

Bruno Julius Florian Taut was a renowned German architect, urban planner and author of Prussian Lithuanian heritage.

From 1904 to 1908, Bruno Taut worked in Stuttgart for Theodor Fischer and studied urban planning.

Bruno Taut received his first commission through Fischer in 1906, which involved the renovation of the village church in Unterriexingen.

Bruno Taut became a committed follower of the Garden City movement, evidenced by his design for the Falkenberg Estate.

Bruno Taut adopted the futuristic ideals and techniques of the avant-garde as seen in the prismatic dome of the Glass Pavilion, which he built for the association of the German glass industry for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne.

Bruno Taut's aim was to make a whole building out of glass instead of merely using glass as a surface or decorative material.

Bruno Taut created glass-treaded metal staircases, a waterfall with underlighting, and colored walls of mosaic glass.

In 1910 after training in Berlin, working for Theodor Fischer's firm in Stuttgart, and establishing his own firm in Berlin, the experienced architect Hermann Muthesius suggested that Bruno Taut visit England to learn the garden city philosophy.

Bruno Taut had socialist sympathies, and before World War I this hindered his advancement.

Bruno Taut began to write and sketch, less to escape from the brutalities of war than to present a positive utopia in opposition to this reality.

Bruno Taut completed two housing projects in Magdeburg from 1912 through 1915, which were influenced directly by the humane functionalism and urban design solutions of the garden city philosophy.

The estate consists of one-story terrace houses and was the first project in which Bruno Taut used colour as a design principle.

Bruno Taut served as a city architect in Magdeburg from 1921 to 1923.

Bruno Taut designed the exhibition hall City and Countryside in 1921 with concrete trusses and a central skylight.

In contrast to the pure-white entries from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut's house was painted in primary colors.

From March 1919, Bruno Taut belonged to their three-man management team, along with Adolf Behne, Cesar Klein and Walter Gropius.

In 1924 Bruno Taut was made chief architect of GEHAG, a Berlin public housing cooperative, and was the main designer of several successful large residential developments in Berlin, notably the 1925 Hufeisensiedlung, named for its configuration around a pond, and the 1926 Onkel-Toms-Hutte development in Zehlendorf, named for a local restaurant and set in a thick grove of trees.

Bruno Taut worked for the city architect of Berlin, Martin Wagner, on some of Berlin's Modernist Housing Estates, now recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Between 1924 and 1931, Bruno Taut's team completed more than 12,000 dwellings.

In tribute to Bruno Taut, GEHAG incorporated an abstracted graphic of the Horseshoe Estate in its logo.

Bruno Taut was promised work in the USSR in 1932 and 1933 but was obliged to return to Germany in February 1933 to a hostile political environment.

Bruno Taut made his home in Takasaki, Gunma, where he produced three influential book-length appreciations of Japanese culture and architecture, comparing the historical simplicity of Japanese architecture with modernist discipline.

Bruno Taut was noted for his appreciation of the stark, minimalist vein of Japanese architecture found at the Ise Shrine and the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto.

Bruno Taut was the first to write extensively about the architectural features of the Katsura Imperial Villa from a modernist perspective.

Bruno Taut's writing on the Japanese minimalist aesthetic found an appreciative audience in Japan and subsequently influenced the work of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.

The only extant Bruno Taut-designed architectural work in Japan is the extension to the Hyuga Villa at Atami in Shizuoka.

Some of Bruno Taut's work was received unfavorably and labeled as "cubic".

Bruno Taut's studio resembled that of the Einstein Tower in Potsdam, while the front view recalled a Japanese pagoda.

Bruno Taut's last building project, the Cebeci School, was left unfinished.