Bruno Taut

Vocation

German architect, urban planner and author active during the Weimar period, known for his theoretical works as well as his designs and buildings. Between 1924 and 1931, Taut's team completed more than 12,000 dwellings. 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 adopted the futuristic ideals and techniques of the avante-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. His aim was to make a whole building out of glass instead of merely using glass as a surface or decorative material. 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. A lifelong painter, Taut was distinguished from his European modernist contemporaries by his devotion to color. As in Magdeburg, he applied lively, clashing colours to his first major commission, the 1912 Gartenstadt Falkenberg housing estate in Berlin, which became known as the "Paint Box Estates". 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. Taut died on 24 December 1938, aged 58, in Istanbul. Link to Wikipedia biography