Bruno Taut

Bruno Taut, born on 4 May 1880 in Königsberg, now Kaliningrad; died on 24 December 1938 in Istanbul, was a German architect and urban planner. He is primarily known for the large-scale housing estates in Berlin-Britz (Hufeisensiedlung / Horseshoe Estate) and Berlin-Zehlendorf (Onkel Toms Hütte / Uncle Tom’s Cabin). For the German Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914 he created the Glashaus, the much-admired pavilion of the German glass industry, which made him famous. The building had a polygonal floor plan, a metal supporting structure and a glass dome made up of rhomboid glass elements. When the first world war broke out shortly afterwards he refused war service and took over directing the construction of a powder factory in Brandenburg, in order to be classified as indispensable. In 1917 he wrote an anti-war manifesto and created peace monuments, in 1918 his great cycle of pictures “Alpine Architecture” and the writings ''Dissolution of Cities'' and ''The City Crown''. In 1919 he founded the secret correspondence circle Die Gläserne Kette (The Glass Chain). Among his most famous quotations is his dictum about architecture, "For me architecture embodies both the crystallisation of longing for a life in the community as well as the means of giving visible form to religious belief.”