Bruno Taut

Taut was born in Königsberg in 1880. After secondary school, he studied at the Baugewerkschule. In the following years, Taut worked in the offices of various architects in Hamburg and Wiesbaden. In 1903, he was employed by Bruno Möhring in Berlin, where he acquainted himself with Jugendstil and new building methods combining steel with masonry. From 1904 to 1908, Taut worked in Stuttgart for Theodor Fischer and studied urban planning. He received his first commission through Fischer in 1906, which involved the renovation of the village church in Unterriexingen.

In 1908, he returned to Berlin to study art history and construction at the Royal Technical Higher School of Charlottenburg (Königlich Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg), now the Technical University of Berlin. A year later, he established the architecture firm Taut & Hoffmann with Franz Hoffmann.

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 Taut visit England to learn the garden city philosophy. Muthesius also introduced him to some of the Deutscher Werkbund group of architects, including Walter Gropius. Taut had socialist sympathies, and before World War I this hindered his advancement.

Taut's first large projects came in 1913. He became a committed follower of the Garden City movement, evidenced by his design for the Falkenberg Estate.

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 reform estate, created for a housing trust, was built in 1912–15 in the southwest of Magdeburg. The estate consists of one-story terrace houses and was the first project in which Taut used colour as a design principle. The construction of the estate was continued by Carl Krayl. Taut served as a city architect in Magdeburg from 1921 to 1923. During his time a few residential developments were built, one of which was the Hermann Beims estate (1925–28) with 2,100 apartments. Taut designed the exhibition hall City and Countryside in 1921 with concrete trusses and a central skylight.

In 1924 Taut was made chief architect of GEHAG, a Berlin public housing cooperative, and was the main designer of several successful large residential developments ("Gross-Siedlungen") in Berlin, notably the 1925 Hufeisensiedlung ("Horseshoe Estate"), named for its configuration around a pond, and the 1926 Onkel-Toms-Hütte development ("Uncle Tom's Cabin") in Zehlendorf, named for a local restaurant and set in a thick grove of trees. Both of these constructions became prominent examples of the use of colorful details in architecture.

Between 1924 and 1931, Taut's team completed more than 12,000 dwellings. In tribute to Taut, GEHAG incorporated an abstracted graphic of the Horseshoe Estate in its logo. This state housing association was sold by the Senate of Berlin in 1998; its legal successor is Deutsche Wohnen.

Being a noted advocate of socialist political policies, Taut was compelled to look for opportunities to emigrate from Germany when the Nazis gained power. He 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.

Later in the same year, Taut fled to Switzerland. Then, with an invitation from Japanese architect Isaburo Ueno, he traveled to Japan via France, Greece, Turkey and Vladivostok, arriving in Tsuruga, Japan, on May 3, 1933. 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. For a time Taut worked as an industrial design teacher, and his models of lamps and furniture sold at the Miratiss shop in Tokyo.

Offered a position as Professor of Architecture at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul (currently, Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts), Taut relocated to Turkey in 1936. In Ankara he joined other German wartime exiles, including Martin Wagner and Taut's associate Franz Hillinger, who arrived in 1938. Some of Taut's work was received unfavorably, however, and labeled as "cubic". In a letter to a Japanese friend he wrote, "They gave me a great opportunity in that they gave me freedom for my craft. I will make a building that is not 'cubic'; they are calling all modernism cubic. For this building, I am thinking of using some Turkish motifs." He proceeded to design his own house in İstanbul's Ortaköy neighborhood, bridging the architectural traditions of his exile existence. His studio resembled that of the Einstein Tower in Potsdam, while the front view recalled a Japanese pagoda.

Before his death in 1938, Taut wrote at least one more book and designed a number of educational buildings in Ankara and Trabzon under commissions from the Turkish Ministry of Education. The most significant of these buildings were the Faculty of Languages, History and Geography at Ankara University, Ankara Atatürk High School and Trabzon High School. His last building project, the Cebeci School, was left unfinished. Taut's final work, one month before his death, was the catafalque that was used for the official state funeral of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on 21 November 1938 in Ankara. It was a simple design, consisting of large wooden columns and a flag that covered the coffin.

Taut died on 24 December 1938 and was laid to rest at the Edirnekapı Martyr's Cemetery in Istanbul as its first and only non-Muslim.