Bruno Taut, born in 1880 in Königsberg, trained as an architect at the Königsberg Baugewerbeschule and moved to Berlin in 1902 where he worked for the Art Nouveau architect Bruno Möhring.
From 1904 to 1908, he worked for Professor Theodor Fischer in Stuttgart and subsequently returned to Berlin to study art history and town planning at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg.
He opened his own architectural practice in 1909. In 1919, Taut initiated the “Arbeitsrat für Kunst” (Work Council for the Arts) that sought to extend the German Revolution of 1918-1919 to the field of art. He started a secret exchange of letters under the name “Die gläserne Kette” (The Glass Chain) with such participants as Walter Gropius and Hans Scharoun, calling for the “dissolution of previous foundations” of architecture and the “disappearance of the personality” of the artist.
From 1921 to 1924, Bruno Taut served as city architect in Magdeburg where he had entire streetscapes and the Baroque town hall repainted in bright colours. Influenced by Expressionism, Taut incorporated colour as a relevant element of the architecture.
From 1924 to 1931, he built residential estates in Berlin providing some 12,000 dwellings. Unlike in his theoretical writings, the focus of these projects was not so much on the artistic aspects of architecture but on the social concerns.
In 1930, Bruno Taut was appointed to the faculty of the Technische Hochschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg as a professor of housing construction and urban development and was made an honorary member of the International Architectural Society in Japan.
In 1932, he built a large office for the city administration in Moscow. Just two weeks after his return to Berlin in 1933, he was forced to flee from the National Socialists, first to Switzerland and then onto Japan. Encountering limited interest in modern architecture in Japan, he relocated to Turkey in 1936, which had been making efforts for some time to attract European and American architects to help modernize the country. Here he was named chairman of the architecture department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul and head of the architectural bureau of the Ministry of Education in Ankara.
Bruno Taut died in 1938 in Istanbul.
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