Bruno Taut

Bruno Taut
b. Konigsberg, 1880;
d. Istanbul, 1938. I

Key pioneer German avant-garde famous architect and theorist, associated initially with the Activist group of Expressionists and later with the new objectivity or social functionalism. Trained briefly in Konigsberg and Berlin-Charlottenburg, Taut worked in Theodor Fischer’s office in Stuttgart (1904-8) before opening his own firm in Berlin (1910). He ran a busy practice with office and exhibition projects before the First World War. He completed his famous Glass Pavilion for the Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne, in 1914. A year earlier he had designed the Steel Industrial Pavilion for the Leipziger Fair. Both buildings were erected in conjunction with his partner Franz Hoffmann, although the Glass Pavilion was the product of a close collaboration between Taut and his mentor, the Expressionist poet Paul Scheerbart (1887?1915). After the war, Taut became the virtual leader of the Berlin architectural avant-garde. In 1918 he had assumed chairmanship of the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst, with responsibility for shaping the “Architectural Programme” of that year. In 1919 he saw the publication of drawings prepared during the war depicting a visionary Utopia under the title Alpine Architektur. He issued his Expressionist supplement Friihlicht as part of a planning magazine in Berlin (1920-21) and as a “Glass Chain” publication in its own right from Magdeburg (1921-2) after he had become the City Architect. In 1923 he returned to Berlin to recommence practice with his brother Max Taut (1887?1967) and Hoffmann. He produced his book Modern Architecture in English in 1930 for the Studio Press. By the end of the 1920s Taut had become well known as a propagandist of the Neue Sachlichkeit or the “New Objective” architecture. He built many estates in Berlin, including “Onkel Tom’s” Estate, subsequently often using Marxist colours for the exterior faces. He left Germany for the USSR in 1932 and a year later went to Japan, where he stayed until 1936. He eventual?ly died in Istanbul in 1938, the year in which he had entered the competition for a new parliament building in Ankara.

Major buildings / works:
L Steel Industries Pavilion, Leipzig, 1913.
Garden City “Am Falkenberg”, Berlin, 1913-14.
Glass Pavilion, Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne, 1914.
General Plan for Magdeburg, 1921.
Housing Estates: Berlin-Tegel, 1924-32;
Berlin-Britz, 1925-30;
Berlin?Zehlendorf (”Onkel Tom’s” Estate), 1926-31 etc.

Bibliography:
J Bruno Taut, Die StadtkrOne, Jena, 1919.
J Bruno Taut, Alpine Architecture, Hagen, 1919.
J Bruno Taut, Friihlicht, 1920-21.
J Bruno Taut, Die neue Wohnung, Leipzig, 1924.
J Bruno Taut, Bauen, Leipzig, 1927.
J Bruno Taut, Modern Architecture, London, 1930.
K. Junghans, Bruno Taut 1880-1938, Berlin, 1970.
Dennis Sharp (ed.), Glass Architecture/Alpine Architecture, London, 1972.
I. Boyd Whyte, Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism, Cambridge, 1982.

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Antonio Sant’Elia

An Example of Futurism Architecture, By Antonio Saint Elia

Antonio Sant’Elia
b. Como, 1888;
d. Monfalcone, 1916. I

Only two years before his tragic death in the First World War, a famous architect, Antonio Sant’Elia had published a spirited manifesto accompanied by a collection of visionary drawings which were to become some of the most potent architectural images of the Twentieth Century. He studied architecture in Como, receiving a diploma in 1905, at the Accademia di Brera in Milan and subsequently at the Scuola di Belle Arti in Bologna, where he received his diploma in 1912. Early influences included both Vienna Secession and Stile Liberty architects, but it was a fasci?nation for the soaring skyscrapers of Chicago and New York which provided the inspiration for the drawings of Sant’Elia’s utopian metropolis ? the Citt? Nuova. His drawings evoke a Brave New World where the machine is omnipotent and the city consists of monumental tow?ers and stark abstract forms. In 1912 he joined with several radical Milanese architects, including Mario Chiattone and Marcello Nizzoli, to form the Nuove Tendenze group, which rejected the dogma of history in order to embrace technology and the future. Sant’Elia contributed to the group’s first exhibition some two years later. His preface to the catalogue, entitled the Messaggio, was slightly reworked and published under the title Manifesto of Futurist Architecture. This seminal document echoed much of the Futurists’ propaganda by attacking the anachronisms of the past and calling for a new order focused on the machine age.

List of major buildings / works by Antonio Sant’elia:
Memorial to the War Dead (designed, after a sketch by Sant’Elia, by Enrico Prampolini, completed by Giuseppe Terragni and Enrico Prampolini, Como, 1933). Almost 300 drawings and projects.
Bibliography
Eric Langenskiold, Michele Sanmicheli, the architect of Verona, Uppsala, 1938.
L. Puppi, Michele Sanmicheli, Padua, 1971.
Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture, Cambridge, 1970.
Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism, London, 1977.
Luciano Caramel and Alberto Longatti, Antonio Sant’Elia ? The Complete Works, New York, 1987.

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Clorindo Testa

Clorindo Testa
b. Naples, 1923.

Clorindo Testa - Prominent Latin-American famous architect who employs a rigorously empirical approach to the process of architecture. He studied at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the National University of Buenos Aires at a time when the academic curriculum was still dominated by the Beaux-Arts tradition. After graduating in 1948 he joined the Buenos Aires Regulating Plan but left the following year for Italy, where he spent three years pursuing an abiding interest in painting. On returning to Argentina he established a private practice, but he prefers to work with a diversity of colleagues on individual projects. Thus his work defies easy classification, but it is often characterized by a boldness of form and spatial manipulation also seen in his paintings and sketches. The use of a heavily textured concrete finish in his competition-winning design for the project at La Pampa, Santa Rosa, is often credited as the first Brutalist building in Argentina. His best-known work, the Bank of London in Buenos Aires, a huge concrete structure dominating a narrow street, is often cited as the city’s most important 20-century building.

Major buildings / works:
Civic Centre and Bus Terminal, Santa Rosa (with Boris Dabinovic, Augusto Gaido and Francisco Rossi), 1955-63.
Bank of London and South America, Buenos Aires (with Sepra), 1959-66.
National Library, Buenos Aires (with Francisco Bullrich and Alicia Cazzaniga de Bullrich), 1962-84; unfinished (1990).
Government Hospital, Ivory Coast, 1979.

Bibliography:
Julio Llimas, Clorindo Testa, Buenos Aires, 1962.
Francisco Bullrich, New Directions in Latin- American Architecture, New York, 1969. Damian Bayon and Paolo Gasparini, The Changing Shape of Latin-American Architecture, Chichester, 1979.
World Architecture S (special issue), 1990.

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Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Karl Friedrich Schinkel
b. Neuruppin, Prussia, 1781;
d. Berlin, I 1841.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel was a leading exponent of Prussian Neo-Classicism. Following his studies at the Bauakademie in Berlin, where he was taught by Friedrich GILLY, Schinkel travelled to Italy and France (1803-5). He returned to an economically depressed Prussia under French occupation, and worked initially as a painter and stage designer. He painted his first panorama for Karl Wilhelm Gropius in 1806 and had completed a further forty by 1815. Schinkel also produced oil paintings at this time in a romantic manner that drew equally on classical and medieval sources, and created many stage sets, most notably for The Magic Flute (1815) and The Maid of Orleans (1816). Schinkel was appointed Surveyor to the Prussian Building Commission in 1810 and, following the defeat of the French, he remodelled the city plan and created a series of monumental buildings that expressed the cultural ambitions of 19th Century Prussia. Disenchantment with the politics of the French Revolution and with Napoleonism turned the Prussian architects against the Neo-Roman manner favoured by the Ecole des Beaux Arts. This aesthetic preference, reinforced by the need for strict economy, led Schinkel to a Neo-Greek style that mirrored the German idealist vision of Athenian Greece as a model of political and moral freedom. The resulting architecture was based on the simplest constructional forms, the column and lintel. Schinkel’s first major work in Berlin was the Neue Wache on Unter den Linden (1816-18), a simple tubiform block fronted by a Doric portico. In April 1818 he was commissioned to rebuild the Nationaltheater, and produced a design that gave clear articulation to the three main functions of the building ? auditorium, concert hall, reception rooms ? within a highly disciplined external system of columns, pilasters and cornices. His most celebrated commission for Berlin, the Altes Museum (1823-30), has as its focus a central rotunda, designed to house antique sculpture, while the colonnaded main facade derives from the Greek stoa. Schinkel was entirely undogmatic in his classicism, however, and provided designs in both classical and Gothic manners for the Werdersche Kirche in Berlin, which was ultimately built in an anglicized brick Gothic style (1824-30). In contrast, the Nikolaikirche in Potsdam used a centralized plan derived from Gilly, and the four small churches built during the 1830s in the north of Berlin were all Neo-Classical. In 1826 Schinkel travelled to England and Scotland, where he was particularly impressed by the architecture of the early Industrial Revolution. The iron frame of a mill in Stroud, Gloucestershire, provided Schinkel with the model for his Bauakademie in Berlin (1831-5), whose frame and infill construction provided a model for the industrial classicism of Peter Behrens, and, ultimately, for the steel frame structures of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. As court architect, Schinkel was responsible for many interiors and summer residences for the Prussian royal family, including a pavilion in the park of Schloss Charlottenburg (1824-5), Schloss Glienicke (1824 on, Grosse Neugierde 1835-7), and the Romische Bader and Charlottenhof in the park of Sanssouci, Potsdam. Royal connections also prompted the two great schemes of the 1830s: a palace for King Otto von Wittelsbach on the Acropolis in Athens (1834); and a summer residence for the Tsarina of Russia at Orianda in the Crimea (1838). Neither project was built, but Schinkel’s brilliant drawings survive to mark a climax in the dialogue between Neo-Classical Prussia and Periclean Athens.

List of major buildings / works:
Mausoleum for Queen Luise of Prussia, 1810.
Neue Wache, Berlin, 1816-18.
Zivilkasino, Potsdam, 1818-24.
Schauspielhaus, Berlin, 1818-21.
Friedrich Werdersche Kirche, Berlin, 1821-30.
Altes Museum, Berlin, 1823-30.
Kasino, Schloss Glienicke, near Potsdam, 1824-5.
Charlottenhof, Sanssouci, Potsdam, 1826-36.
Allgemeine Bauakademie, Berlin, 1831-6.
Elizabeth-Kirche, Berlin, 1832-4.
Project: Palace for Otto von Wittelsbach on the Acropolis, Athens, 1834.
Roman Baths, Sanssouci, Potsdam, 1834-40.
Project: Palace for the Tsarina of Russia, Orianda, near Yalta, 1838.

Bibliography
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Collection of Architectural Designs (based on the Archttektomsches Entwitrfe edition of 1866: London, 1981, 1984).
August Grisebach, Karl Friedrich Schmkel, Leipzig, 1924; reprinted Munich, 1981.
H. G. Pundt, Schmkers Berlin, Cambridge, Mass., 1972.
David Watkin and Tilman Mellinghoff, German Architecture and the Classical Ideal 1740-1840, London, 1987.

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