Bruno Taut Research Articles

‘Farmers on notice’: the threat faced by Weimar Berlin's garden colonies in the face of the city'sNeues Bauenhousing programme

ABSTRACT:TheNeues Bauenprogramme of urban development in Weimar Germany is best known amongst English-speaking historians for its modern housing estates, including those built by Bruno Taut in Berlin. Less well known are the negative impacts of this programme, particularly the displacement of thousands of garden colonies from the outskirts of towns and cities, which were cleared to make way for new developments. This article focuses on the historical development of the garden colonies in Berlin, and the threat they faced from urban expansion during the Weimar era.

Review: Guerre du toit et modernité architecturale: loger l'employé sous la république de Weimar by Christine Mengin

Christine Mengin. Guerre du toit et modernite architecturale: loger l'employe sous la republique de Weimar . Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007, 540 pp., 32 color and 158 b/w illus. €45, ISBN 9782859445676 The introduction of a new style of architecture is often accompanied by conflicts, a sense of unease, even mistrust and disorientation. Conflicts about style appear to have arisen since antiquity. Vitruvius recounts that the ancient Greeks clashed over the use of different formal vocabularies. Vasari's writings reveal how Renaissance architects despised the Gothic style, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, Augustus W. N. Pugin produced drawings depicting the Gothic as the equivalent of heaven and classical architecture as the embodiment of hell at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One of the most impassioned style conflicts in twentieth-century architecture is the so-called Dacherkrieg (roof war), arising in response to the flat and pitched roofs lining the opposing sides of Am Fischtal, a long street in Berlin-Zehlendorf in 1928. The modernist, flat-roofed Onkel-Tom-Siedlung (Uncle Tom's Housing Estate), designed by a team led by Bruno Taut, occupied the eastern side of the street. An opposing team led by Heinrich Tessenow used more traditional, regional precedents—and sloping roofs—to design Am Fischtalgrund (on the Fischtal site) on the western side of Am Fischtal, touching off the notorious roof war. The research surrounding this incident is the subject of Christine Mengin's sprawling 540-page Guerre du toit et modernite architecturale: loger l'employe sous la republique de Weimar . A paperback with low-resolution black-and-white images integrated into the text, the book also includes 16 color plates that offer original views of the housing estates, reconstruction drawings made in the 1980s, and present-day impressions of the buildings. The book started out as a dissertation and was revised and published in the exclusive series Histoire de l'art–16 of the Universite Paris I Pantheon–Sorbonne. Mengin introduces her topic by explaining the stylistic development of architecture in Germany in the early twentieth century. She describes how architects who had …

BRUNO TAUT'S METHOD TO GENERATE UTOPIAN ARCHITECTURAL FORMS OBSERVED IN “DIE WELTBAUMEISTER”

In “Die Weltbaumeister”, a book of architectural drama of the collapse and the rebirth of architecture published by Bruno Taut in 1920, three types of formal languages are found through the formal analysis of all pictures in the book, namely historical forms, vegetable forms and crystal forms. The system integrating all those types were especially found in the total form of his image of “Crystal House”. This paper has clarified this book shows Taut's thought about metamorphose of architectural forms, and is a relevant material to understand how his utopian architectural forms were generated around 1920.

THE STRUCTURAL OUTLINE FOR GENERATION OF EXPRESSIONISTIC CITY IMAGE AND ITS ARCHITECTURAL THOUGHT OBSERVED IN THE BOOK“CITY CROWN”BY BRUNO TAUT

It is clarified that the book“City Crown”edited by Bruno Taut had a subtle structural outline in order to appeal the decline and the rebirth of urban image, composed of a theoretical essay with an architectural project by Taut, visionary poems of an expressionistic poet, a critique on social theory by a journalist and an essay on art history by a modernistic critic. The architectural thought created by Taut is discussed on following topics: 1. architecture as a medium of rebirth, 2.‘social’thought, 3. universality transcending Europe, 4. concentrated city image with a void core.

Bruno Taut and the Program for the Protection of Monuments in Turkey (1937-38): Three Case Studies: Ankara, Edirne and Bursa

Bruno Taut and the Program for the Protection of Monuments in Turkey (1937-38): Three Case Studies: Ankara, Edirne and Bursa

The City Crown by Bruno Taut

Translator's Introduction In the early part of the 20th century, Bruno Taut developed an urban concept for the planning and reconfiguration of European cities to overcome national and social differences by means of architecture. A communal center modeled after the medieval cathedral or temple crowned Taut's city. In his anthology Die Stadtkrone (The City Crown) (1919), a critical text for the history of European Modernism, Taut championed the use of individual structures to define and affect the planning of an entire city.1 Taut's anthology encouraged young architects to envision and build the ideal rather than perpetuate the quotidian. This first English translation of The City Crown maintains Taut's original goal.

ブルーノ・タウトが設計した自宅の修復に関する調査研究（第2報）

ブルーノ・タウトが設計した自宅の修復に関する調査研究（第2報）

Cracovian modernists - the 60 ties, 90 ties of the XX century - the returns

The European reaction of the leading architects towards the period of international style, “The idea of style has yet again become up-to-date. The modern style, covering the whole world, is uniform and coherent...” [4], promoted at the exhibition “Modernist architecture” organized in Museum of Art in New York by architects Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philips Johnson, was immediate. The leading European architects: a) Walter Gropius wrote: “The aim of Bauhaus was not to promote one particular style...” [4], b) Le Corbusier formulated “Fundamental principles of aesthetics” [4], c) Bruno Taut wrote: “Five assumptions of new architecture” [4]. The message that “The form follows the function” became the very principle of modernism. The year 1972, when the blocks of flats in St. Louis, US were blown up, and the year of the actual end of the ideology originating from CIAM, is the agreed time marked as the end of modernism. It was a few years after Le Corbusier’s death (1965) - the death of the unchallenged spiritual ideologist of modernism.

ブルーノ・タウト設計円形住宅「チーズカバー」に関する調査報告

ブルーノ・タウト設計円形住宅「チーズカバー」に関する調査報告

Japan-ness in Architecture (review)

Reviewed by: Japan-ness in Architecture Ken Tadashi Oshima (bio) Japan-ness in Architecture. By Arata Isozaki; edited by David B. Stewart; translated by Sabu Kohso. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006. xx, 349 pages. $29.95. The central problematic of my book takes form as a hypothesis, namely that the epitome of the creation of this something Japanese is encountered in the twentieth century—with the advent of certain architects who contrived to deal with the external pressures of modern architecture, responding with something unique. My essay "Japan-ness in Architecture" tackles their struggles; it is placed first in the book, but was written last. My aim was to trace their formative stance toward Japan-ness, up to and including my own personal involvement from the late 1960s. This essay is a sort of metacritique of what I had written about Ise, Chōgen, and Katsura and their discursive grounds. It attempted to trace the process through which Japan-ness itself was constructed as a discourse in Japanese modernity. (p. xiv) –Arata Isozaki The question of what is "Japan-ness in architecture" has preoccupied Isozaki Arata (1931– ) for more than two decades through a series of essays that are compiled and presented together for the first time in English in this 2006 book. Isozaki emerged in the 1960s as the leading designer and theorist of his generation as a student and as a collaborator of architect Tange Kenzō (1913–2005). Through his career, he has designed more than 450 projects that span the globe and has written more than 50 books. While noted internationally for projects such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1981–86), the Nara Centennial Hall (1992–98), and most recently the Turin Ice Hockey Stadium for the 2006 Winter Olympics, a majority of his writings that combine historical survey, critical analysis, and theoretical reflection have previously remained untranslated into English. In Japan-ness in Architecture, rather than theorizing his own designs, Isozaki interprets the great Japanese monuments of Ise Shrine (seventh century), Tōdaiji (twelfth century), and Katsura Imperial Villa (seventeenth century) as dynamic events and textual spaces and not merely as inert objects. In other words, Isozaki's book presents these landmarks as challenging discursive spaces, rather than as an exhaustive historical study or illustrated monograph, and thereby begs for further contextual background. From the outset, the term "Japan-ness" is presented as a polemic counter to an essentialist understanding of "Japan" or "Japanese" (as an adjective, language, and race) and consequently a critique of works such as the German expatriate architect Bruno Taut's Fundamentals of Japanese Architecture [End Page 234] (1936) and Kuki Shuzō's "Iki" no kōzō (Reflections on Japanese taste: the structure of iki) (1930). While the term "Japan-ness" may seem awkward as a newly constructed word, it is a translation of the phrase Nihon-teki na mono which literally means "things Japanese in character." As translator Sabu Kohso asserts, the English phrase embraces the heterogeneous adjectives of Japanesque, Japonica, and japonaiserie. Isozaki contends that Japan's obsession with Japanese-ness or Japan-ness is "due in the final analysis to Japan's mentality as an island nation" (pp. xiv–xv). "The Island Nation Aesthetic" is the title of Isozaki's previous pamphlet book published in 1996, which he begins by quoting Oscar Wilde's contention that "'Japan' or the idea of 'Japanese things' was purely an invention, an aesthetic fiction" and that "'Japanese things' (could) be found by studying the works of a certain Japanese artist in the comfort of one's home (with no need to go to Tokyo)."1 Instead of rejecting such an outside perspective as inaccurate or misinformed, Isozaki embraces interpretations of monumental works such as Ise Shrine and Katsura Villa, both praised by Taut when he visited Japan in 1933. Accepting that all notions of Japan, Japanese, and Japan-ness are fictive, whether perceived within or outside the nation's geographic borders, Isozaki argues that what is considered as emblematic of the Japanese aesthetic outside Japan "is far from the embryonic Japan-ness born in such critical moments of an earlier past as are here described" (p. xv). He...

The Japanese Experience of Environmental Architecture through the Works of Bruno Taut and Antonin Raymond

Around 1930 the Modern Movement in Architecture was widespread throughout Europe and America. The next and predictable step was the search for regions that were on the whole deprived of a firm sense of civil building procedures. To a certain extent, the tropics were such an area. Their authorities, mostly for want of social organization or techniques, welcomed the import of a new industrial system of construction which seemed efficient and unprejudiced, instead of creating their own ways from fear they might be old–fashioned. However, as modern fabrics had stemmed from temperate conditions the progress of these was hindered by unsuspected features of the tropical climate: monsoons, earthquakes and hot spells. In the present research, the authors hope to contribute to a careful examination of the designs conceived in Japan to overcome this major contradiction of modern architecture and to provide some hints for the future in Asia. This was done by using accepted scientific design methods such as computer simulation, duly tested by virtue of on–site measurements. As eminent illustrations we will discuss the works of Bruno Taut and Antonin Raymond that were subsequently extended to India or Turkey among other countries.

国立工芸指導所そしてブルーノ・タウト : 仙台の近代デザインの遺産の紹介(パネル展示,第1回第1支部大会開催記録)

国立工芸指導所そしてブルーノ・タウト : 仙台の近代デザインの遺産の紹介(パネル展示,第1回第1支部大会開催記録)

From Object to Installation in Bruno Taut's Exhibit Pavilions

This study investigates the gradual evolution of the idea of installation in three experimental exhibition pavilions designed before World War I by the German architect Bruno Taut. In collaboration with the critic Adolf Behne, Taut gradually transferred ideas from Expressionist painting to architecture and helped move his designs, and with it modern architecture more generally, from a focus on visual “objects,” to multisensory “experiences,” an idea that continues to resonate in modern installations today.

ブルーノ・タウトの日本建築についての思索の研究 : 「デュアリズム」の表現について

This paper aims to clarify the significance of dualistic way of thinking in Bruno Taut's findings in Japan and is organized as follows. Since the roots of dualism goes back to Taut's writings in Expressionist period, first in chapter-II, background of dualistic attitude is discussed through his earlier writings in order to prove the firmness of this kind of way of thinking in Taut's thought. Following that, from chapter-III onward, we focus our attention on dualistic characters of Taut's theories related to the traditional Japanese architecture. Since we shall refer traditional buildings, the most famous of which are traditional farmhouses, the shrines of Ise (Ise Jingu), and above all, the Katsura Detached Palace, the first part of chapter-III bears on the question of why Taut admired these buildings and how these buildings could be connected with his theories on modern architecture. Then in the second part, we trace Taut's dualistic attitude through his writings on Japan. What Taut praised most in Japanese architecture will be studied in the following chapter (IV) under the title of 'The Unity of Dualistic Elements' by means of concentrating on the key conceptions in three subchapters-Expression (IV.1), Total simplicity (IV.2), and Philosophic attitude (IV.3) that shares certain similarities with Taut's ideas of Expressionist period.

Fechner und die Folgen außerhalb der Naturwissenschaften: Interdisziplinäres Kolloquium zum 200. Geburtstag Gustav Theodor Fechners ed. by Ulla Fix. Tübingen, From Cosmology to Ecology: The Monist World-View in Germany from 1770 to 1930 by Eric Paul Jacobsen

MLR, IOI.3, 2006 89I and stimulating account of an important tendency in nineteenth-century German letters. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY ROBERT C. HOLUB Fechner und die Folgen auJ3erhalb der Naturwissenschaften: Interdisziplindres Kollo quium zum 200. Geburtstag Gustav Theodor Fechners. Ed. by ULLA Fix. Tiibin gen: Niemeyer. 2003. E48. ISBN 3-484-7004I-6. From Cosmology toEcology: The Monist World-View inGermany from I770 to I930. By ERIC PAUL JACOBSEN. (German Life and Civilization, 43) Oxford, Bern, Brussels, Frankfurt a.M., New York, and Vienna: Peter Lang. 2005. 40I pp. ?42; SwF 93; E64.20. ISBN 3-039Io-306-7. In the current wave of interest in the connections between scientific thought and literary writing, Gustav Theodor Fechner (I80I-87) has come to be seen as a fas cinating link figure for the German-speaking world. For in his life and his writings he combined a commitment to precise empirical research (he is remembered by ex perimental psychologists for establishing an important principle of visual perception) with speculation on the world of nature in its entirety based on the notion that all matter is in some sense animate (panpsychism). These two dimensions of Fechner's work, which tend to appear in the perspective of later times asworlds apart, were not represented by separate phases of his career, but were pursued in conjunction and evidently viewed by him as integrally connected. While he was teaching physics at Leipzig from I834 to I839 he was also publishing on poetry and its role in achiev ing an integrated view of the world, and during the period when he published his most important speculative writings-Nanna oder Uber das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (i 848), Zend-Avesta oder Uber die Dinge desHimmels unddesJenseits: Vom Standpunkt der Naturbetrachtung (i 85 I)-he continued towrite essays on such specific scientific issues as electro-dynamics and the theory of atoms. The writings of his later years, which include Elemente der Psychophysik (i86o) and Vorschule der Asthetik (I876), show him drawing simultaneously on both parts of his intellectual enquiry. While the speculative side of Fechner's thought was always controversial among scientists and tended to be dismissed as outmoded by the end of the nineteenth century, his writings continued to be widely read in the early twentieth century. Wilhelm Bolsche, Paul Scheerbart, Alfred Doblin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Franz Kafka, as well as Bruno Taut and the architects of the 'Gliserne Kette', all showed a keen interest in Fechner's ideas. The contributions to Fechner und die Folgen auJ3erhalb der Naturwissenschaften, the proceedings of an interdisciplinary colloquium held at the University of Leipzig in 2001, point to several reasons for taking Fechner seriously as a representative of the condition of scientific thinking in his time, as well as in a broader cultural context. Michael Heidelberger demonstrates the empiricist foundations of Fechner's world-view-he held that all physical phenomena, including living organisms, could be accounted for by physical laws-while also explaining the precise senses inwhich Fechner distinguished his position from that of reductive materialism: he argued that additional laws were needed to explain the inherent tendencies of organic phenomena, avoided the attribution of psychic phenomena to physical causes, and proposed instead a functional relationship between the two (this is the basis of the psycho-physical parallelism often associated with his name). Itwas in response toFechner's position, as Heidelberger shows, that such later thinkers as Ernst Mach, Alois Riegl, and Charles Sanders Peirce were able to develop influential intellectual positions of their own. By comparing Fechner's arguments with those of a contemporary, the astrophysicist 892 Reviews and spiritist Karl Friedrich Z6llner, the mathematical expert Riidiger Thiele is able to show how sternly Fechner resisted occult thinking, and in particular the notion of a 'fourth dimension' where spirits might reside; and Dirk Evers explains how Fechner integrates the principles of physics, Romantic nature philosophy, and the Christian precept of divine benevolence into a conception of God as the supreme bond connecting all natural phenomena. In the opening essay of the volume, Gert Mattenklott surveys Fechner's writings as testimony to an integral personality and an integrated project, bringing out in particular the role of metaphor in expressing...

Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics in Architecture: Bruno Taut's Translations out of Germany

Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics in Architecture: Bruno Taut's Translations out of Germany

A Quasi-Necessary Cacotechnology: few happy thoughts on architectural imagination and facture

Oh our concepts: space. home. style! Ugh, bow these concepts stink! Destroy them, put an end to them! Let nothing remain! Chase away their schools, let the professonal wigs fly, we'll play catch with them. Blast, blast! Let the dusty, malted. gummed-up world of concepts, ideologies and systems feel our cold north wind! Death to the concept-lice! Death to everything stuffy! Death to everything called title, dignity, authority! Down with everything serious! Bruno Taut. “Frühlicht” (1920)1 This perspicuous representation brings about the understanding, which consists precisely in the fact that we “see the connections.” Hence the importance of finding connecting links. Ludwig Wittgenstein “Remarks on Frazer's Golden Hough.”2

Symbolic content in the emergence of the Miesian free-plan

At a talk at the North Carolina State University in 1952, Mies van der Rohe recounted in rather dramatic terms a discovery that he had made while working on the design for the Barcelona Pavilion: ‘...

ブルーノ・タウトのジードルンク造形観の変遷 : 1930年代における著作をもとにした考察

Bruno Taut has worked in Berlin to design a lot of houses for workers from 1910s to the beginning of 1930s, which can be summarized into three stages, namely 1) the stage of garden city movement, 2) the stage of utopian imagination and 3) the stage of spatial formation of suburban housings around the large city. In 1930s he has written some essays on Siedlung, especially "Siedlungsmemoiren" or "Architecturlehre", from which his final stage of synthetic thought on Siedlung could be extracted through critical analysis. Namely he criticized the modem functionalism and rationalism, and came to set the ideal on the integrated organic method of design respecting the harmony between each part and total form, and also locality or tradition, which can be estimated as the critical inheritance of each stage in his thought on Siedlung.

Ein grüner Archipel

Berlin has always been a green metropolis, located in (splendid?) isolation amidst hundreds of square miles of forest. The city consists of many “urban islands”, separated from each other by green spaces and vast infrastructural corridors, thus resulting in a “green archipelago”. Although some local architects and town- planners prefer to see Berlin as a traditional centralist metropolis, where “good old urbanity” has been saved, in fact, the city functions on many levels as a poly- centric agglomeration. In this article the idea of Berlin as a polycentric “green archipelago” is discussed and promoted. As will be seen, Oswalt Matthias Ungers' article “Cities within the City” from 1978 is not the only interpretation of Berlin as a green metropolis. It appears that throughout the last few centuries, from the “cultural landscape” of Friedrich IV, via Schinkel's “catalytic buildings”, to Bruno Taut's “Stadtkrone” and the Nazi's “Generalbebauungspl an”, down to postwar reconstruction, Berlin has always been considered an urbanized landscape interwoven with verdure, rather than the compact “Grossstadt” made of stone that some people would like her to be. Now that Berlin is in crisis and shrinking, the concept of the “green archipelago” is more relevant than ever. It might more or less “reinstall” itself automatically.