Bruno Taut, Architekt Zwischen Tradition und Avantgarde. (Taut Perspective).

Edited by Winfried Nerdinger et al.

Stuttgart/Munchen: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. 2001. Price [euro] 131,54

Bruno Taut remains remarkably little known in the English-speaking world even though he played a major role in the German Modern Movement. It is instructive to compare his career with that of his near contemporary Walter Gropius. Both made their names with ground-breaking exhibition buildings at the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne of 1914; Gropius with his model factory, Taut with his Glass Pavilion. Both went on to play leading roles in the Expressionist episode after the war, though Taut produced the influential publications. Then while Gropius was developing his Bauhaus in Weimar, Taut became city architect of Magdeburg, a powerful position which taught him more about management and politics than allowing him to build. He turned his attention to housing, publishing some influential books, and in 1924 was made chief architect of GEHAG, the leading left-wing Berlin building society.

So while Gropius guided his school through its heyday at Dessau, Taut was building vast Modernist estates across Berlin: his team produced over 10 000 dwellings by the end of the Weimar Republic. In terms of reputation, the two architects were neck and neck by the time Hitler came to power. Taut, returning from a visit to Moscow, discovered he was blacklisted and in danger of imminent arrest. He fled to Japan, where he fell in love with the local culture and published some influential books. After a couple of years there, with some success as a designer of furniture and domestic interiors, he was finally lured away in 1936 to post-revolutionary Turkey as chief architect for educational buildings. Some large works were realized, but Taut never saw them built: he died in 1938 at the age of 58.

Gropius meanwhile cast his seeds on fertile ground in the UK and Harvard, surviving to tell the story his way, so that by the 1960s the history of Modern German architecture had become the history of the Bauhaus. If Taut's built works had less immediate appeal than Gropius's, they also have a subtlety and variety more respected today -- think of the Horseshoe Estate -- offering an alternative Modernism that is softer, less doctrinaire, more humane, and also recklessly colourful.

Taut's numerous writings have a depth and perspective that leaves them both astute and accessible, and his Modern Architecture, published in English in 1929, is still worth reading. The nicely produced and well-illustrated book under review is by leading German scholars of the period. It puts together Taut's fascinating life story in a series of chapters taking different viewpoints which nonetheless hang together well. Along the way, the authors offer explanations of Taut's theories and of his reactions to his changing experiences. It is a rich read, and a publisher should surely be found to make it available to the English-speaking world: the total lack of works on Taut is a scandal.