Being the prolific German architect, urban planner and
architectural theorist as well as the author and painter active during the
Weimar period, Bruno Julius Florian Taut was born in Königsberg, Germany in
1880. His architectural attitude stays out of the vicious circle formed between
the poles of the duality of the "tradition" flavored
"national" and the imported "modern". Instead, it
alternates between the modernist and regionalist approaches of the attainment
of an ingenious and consistent architectural disposition. Kristina Hartmann
summarizes the architectural path followed by Taut as a "dialectical
totality" structured between the "modern" and the
"tradition".
His hybrid disposition between social responsibility and
artistic fantasy revealed itself in different periods of his professional life.
Marking these evident inclinations, mainly five distinguishable periods can be
detected in his career.
The First Period: Individualistic and Imaginative Phase
Among these periods, the first phase in his
professional life covers the period before and during the First World War in
1910s. The period comes into prominence as an "individualistic" and
imaginative stage, where Taut was mainly experimenting with the use of new
materials such as glass and iron.
In 1901, he was graduated from the Civil
Technicians School in Königsberg, and between 1904 and 1906, he worked in the
Stuttgart bureau of Theodor Fischer, who was a well-known German architect at
the time in Germany. In 1909, he set up his bureau with Franz Hoffmann and his
brother Max Taut. In 1910, he became a member of Deutscher Werkbund, meeting
Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus School.
The two influential designs in
this period, namely the "Glass House" of 1914, which was designed for
the Cologne Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition; and the "Iron Monument" of
1915, which was prepared for Leipzig International Construction Exhibition,
mark Taut's early reputation in architectural circles. The "Glass
House", or Glass Pavilion, was a prismatic glass dome structure and
constructed using concrete and glass. As a period of colored symbolism by Taut,
he believed that the color would bring the joy of living, it had a social
function more than aesthetic or space-forming function.
The Second Period: Expressionistic Phase
The period that can be
characterized as the second phase in Taut's architectural career starts after
the First World War. Identified as an "expressionistic phase", this
period marks a rather theoretically productive stage in Taut's professional
life, where he was involved with quite a number of different organizations such
as the "Arbeitats Für Kunst", which called for the need of the
unification of the arts under the rubric of architecture; and "Novembergruppe",
which upheld the collective and societal quality of the arts in general. The
"societal revolutionist" attitude of these groups resisted the use of
traditional building methods and techniques. In this context, the revolutionist
and socially responsible attitude of Taut came to the fore as an anti-fascist disposition.
In the same period, when architectural atmosphere was closed for revolutionary
ideas in the general sense, Taut continued his searches by the way of different
theoretical publications. For an exchange of ideas about the utopic visions of
glass architecture, he came to the scene as the initiator of the "Glass
Chain Letters" between 1919 and 1923. During these transactions, he also
published his well-known books "The Alpine Architecture", in which he
proposed to crown the summits of the Alpine with crystal structures of colored
glass; and the "Stadtkrone", where he mainly promoted his vision of a
new social order that opposed to the idea of war. Bruno Taut became the city
architect of Magdeburg between 1921 and 1924. During this time, a few
residential developments were built, i.e., the Hermann Beims Estate with 2,100
apartments.
The Third Period: Realistic and Functionalistic Phase
Starting with 1924, a third distinguishable phase in Taut's career
appeared. Motivated by the societal needs and social planning issues arising by
the end of the war, this period comes to be characterized as a
"realistic" and "functionalistic" phase in his career. In
this time, he became one of the chief architect of GEHAG, a housing
organization, and involved a number of Siedlung projects, which also
included the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, where he was invited to
participate by Mies van der Rohe. Totally the number of dwellings he designed
in this period, between 1925 and 1932, exceeds ten thousand in number. Among
them, the Hufeisensiedlung, Berlin Brits and Berlin Zehlendorf Siedlung appear
as the most distinguishable examples of all. In these years, Taut worked for
the city architect of Berlin, Martin Wagner, on some of Berlin's Modernist
Housing Estates, now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The designs
featured controversially modern flat roofs, humane access to sun, air and
gardens, and generous amenities like gas, electric light, and bathrooms.
Until
the fourth phase starting by 1933, in the shifting attitude of his previous
years, one thing that remains unchanged appears as his theoretically
questioning attitude that bears a socially active disposition. In 1933, when
the Nazi regime founded the government, Taut left Germany firstly for Moscow,
then with the invitation he received from the Japan Architectural Association,
he immigrated to Japan, where he spent his following three years from 1933 to
1936.
The Fourth Period: Taut in Japan
In these years of exile he spent in the East, considered as the fourth
phase, Taut's activity came to be limited with mainly theoretical studies that
were concentrated on the Japanese culture and living. This period came out to
be a rather rewarding one in terms of providing the insight for observing and
experimenting the East from within. Grasping the exact meaning of a complete
foreign world of signs and symbols, he seems to have taken not a top-down
reductionist position of the superior observer, but prompted to experience the
environment for what it really was. In this respect, Taut sees the dangers of
the "homogenization of culture", which has been brought by the
process of Westernization, or specifically in architecture, by the spread of
the doctrine modernism of the twentieth century.
During this period in Japan,
he perceived and characterized the dual desire of being modern, and keeping
self-identity, as the polarity of the same pendulum; and he prescribed the
necessity of the coexistence of the "traditional" with the
"modern" in a new synthesis.
The Fifth Period: Taut in Early Republican Turkey
When Taut was invited to Turkey by the
Government upon the recommendation of Martin Wagner, the fifth phase starts in
his architectural career. In 1936, he was appointed both as the Head of the
Architecture Department of the Fine Arts Academy and the Head of the
Architectural Bureau of the Ministry of Education. The first issue that Taut
initiated in the Academy was to change the educational system. In line with his
rationalist and realist modern attitude, Taut firstly prompted to found a new
program that would be based more on the materialistic issues of architectural
designs. On this account, he established a basic course that was inspired by
the preliminary program of the Bauhaus, which included lectures on free hand
drawing and building materials. Taut brought to the Academy a rational approach
in design, which did not reject traditional values yet did form the rudiment
contemporary design understanding.
Architectural Buildings in Ankara, Turkey
The Faculty of Languages and History came
out to be the first architectural work of Taut in the Turkish Republic.
According to Taut, this project would be the expression of his "new"
architectural understanding at the time and the conception he developed about the
"new" Turkish culture. Designed and built between 1937 and 1939, the
building lies longitudinally on the Atatürk Boulevard in the north-south axis.
The building consists of four stories. The ground floor has a different spatial
organization than the upper floors with its planimetric organization. The
blocks at two ends are used for larger spaces such as auditoriums. The upper
floors, accessed by a monumental staircase in the ground floor, are organized
as to contain various smaller spaces such as classrooms, which lie on the sides
of lengthy corridors.
In terms of finishing materials, the front, side and rear
façades have hierarchical differences. In the front façade, the ground floor is
covered with rustic stone while the upper floors are covered with regular ashlar
facing. On the side wings a different type of technique was utilized, formed by
the combined use of stone and brick walling elements. The rear and side façades
are of plain plaster. The building was accepted as to make references to
traditional Turkish architecture as the architect used the early Ottoman brick
and stone walling on the side wings; and the turquoise tile decoration at the
entrance hall.
In the Atatürk High School, Taut created a simple and rational
design that covered the integrated functions of the school in a linear
arrangement in the east and west direction. In this organization, the main
building, with its simplistic façade organization, is tied to the other
sections and to the open front garden by a continuous arcade.
In the Cebeci
Secondary School, the triple arrangement of windows, combined by plain and
continuous sunshades, became the standard façade organization in school designs
at the time. The building with its natural lighting and spacious organization
lining in the east-west direction, is again an example of a functional and
rational architectural understanding.
Architectural Buildings in Trabzon, Turkey
Stretching out longitudinally on the
east-west axis on a plain site, the High School in Trabzon is comprised of one
major block and two additional blocks at the far ends that were connected to
the major block by a "revak" at the front. On the façade of the
classrooms, a triple arrangement was made in the windows with their continuous
sunshades. By the brackets that were utilized to support the wide eaves of the
roof, the building is accepted to make reference to "traditional Turkish
architecture". According to Taut, climate undeniably comes to appear as
the major element, thus, the wide eaves are built for the rainy weather of the
Black Sea region.
Architectural Buildings in İstanbul, Turkey
The House in Ortaköy, which is located in the small woody and
steep area, is a project that best summarizes the activity of Taut in the
Turkish context. The building makes references to both the Japanese building
tradition and the traditional civil architecture of Istanbul. Resting on a
steep slope, a small portion of the rear side of the house, which is single
storied, directly sits on the ground, while the rest of the structure stands on
top of pilotis. Lying in the northwest-northeast direction, the building has a
panoramic view of the Bosphorous. On the two-storied part of the house, the
bottom story, with its windows that are separated vertically into two sections
by a sunshade in the form of clay-tiled roof, looks as if it is two storied.
The top part has an octagonal pyramidal form, which has a panoramic from its
windows covering its six sides. Due to the special, octagonal form of the
roofs, the building also resembles a Japanese pagoda.
Last Architectural Work
Before his death in the December 24, 1938, his last realized
work was the design and execution of the catafalque of Atatürk. Formed by the
quadrangular organization of four bordering columns with the torches on their
capitals, the catafalque was surrounded by greenery and lattice walls on the
sides. Taut died in Istanbul, of an asthma coma, and laid to rest in Edirnekapı
cemetery in Istanbul. Today, twenty-four projects, five of which were realized,
are documented of the time he spent in Turkey.
Conclusion
It is observed that Taut's
architectural attitude, which was far from being dogmatic, used to possess and
understanding of cultural diversity. His "anti-stylistic and formally
indeterminate critical understanding of modernism" enabled him to
comprehend and acknowledge both the rationality of modern design and the
messages of traditional architecture.
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