Friedman 1 Architecture in Berlin 9/11/2011

The Ethical Use of Eccentricity in Bruno Tauts Berlin Projects

Although Bruno Taut was among that first wave of young modernist progenitors, like Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, and J.J.P. Oud, who were favored by Social Democrats to design the new worker housing for post-war Germany, his realized designs stand out over those of his more conservatively modern peers. It is a testament to his successful ingenuity that projects like Onkel-Toms Hutte (1926) and The Britz Estate (1925-33), even today, exude the same aura of progress that they must have in the 1920s. Rather than just relying on how modern these nearly centuries-old developments seem to us now, the legacy of Bruno Tauts career is that, in visiting them, let alone living in them, you still feel what was socially beautiful and remarkably humanist about the modernist architecture movement.

Given the staunch Marxist inclinations that unabashedly dictated his outlandish theorizing, The Britz Estate expresses a compromise between designer and audience that Gropius and other compound architects avoided. To them, The intellectually undeveloped masses, were put lonely atop the pedestal as their chief hope, but they still needed to be hand-held and led into the light. Theory is certainly a tool to find what the workers should want, but Taut, in practice, aimed for what they needed. Primarily, they, both the state that commissioned the project in the first place and the workforce that

Friedman 2 would be shoveled into it, needed something immediately. Of course, given the ethical implications of almost any social experiment in those times, that something needed a strong historical vision. This particular vision, regardless of the style it produced, was responsible to combat any memory of a Berlin where Mietskasernen could ever have existed. The chosen style had pretty clear standards and components. Honest materials like, concrete, steel, wood and glass were the chosen tools. Besides wood, these materials were all essentially governed by necessity and their use and form were dictated, not just by a machine, but by man through the machine. They were perfectly functioning media for the most blatantly modern features of any housing project, the flat roof and sheer faade. However, these two principles were not modern because of their ahistorical simplicity. Decidedly, they were elements that acted against the old anthropomorphic ones; the cornices, pillars, pitched eaves, and plinths that expressed head, midsection, and foot, but, more repulsively, the crown. The rusticated faades on the tenements lied egregiously about who really lived in the compressed piles of dark Berliner rooms behind the original street-facing townhouse. Whatever the reality was when that first townhouse was built was irrelevant, because they were rotting from the inside out. So, in order to express the inside, modern artistry ripped off the adornment and dealt symbiotically with technology. But Bruno Taut, in the Britz Estate and OnkelToms Hutte, went admirably further and dealt with nature, both in the literal sense and concerning human nature.

The Horseshoe shape of the central block, giving the project its nickname, Hufeisensiedlung, is built around a prexisting pond. This concept is fairly obvious and

Friedman 3 romantic, but Taut really did revere topography and the wild, sublime land he was building on in admirable ways. Notably, the tangle of garden paths that connect the private gardens seems like the right kind of romanticism. The maze is obviously negotiable by humans, but is just wild enough to enchant the children that might grow up playing there and wake up the world-weary adults that have a more mature relationship with their dwelling. The relationship is certainly more mature because it is primarily economic, but also because they might have lived in the cramped tenements and navigated their own sort of mazes, the grid-like inner courtyard system that put an ugly electricity in their mothers command to go outside and play. The relationship is also tied to the social and symbolic theories that stained the reputation of all classical details. In the housing tenements, around the turn of the century, the part that faced the street served as a living space for gentry. The same was true of the wings. The back part, called the garden house, was designed for the servants (Schneider, 14). When the front part of a tenement would be blocked from the back, the whole apartment complex was democratically opened to too many families, but from the very superstructure of the blocks, everyone was in the servants quarters. Whether Taut liked it or not, this did not compel the working class to revolt out of disgust with the class system. They, naturally, just wanted to be in the front part of the house. The problem is that no tenemeant would want to feel that their apartment was behind anyone elses. A symmetrical foyer, the easiest symbol of a townhouse, was out of the question for an international style housing project, but masterfully, he solved the spacial problem with a special solution, the bucolic positioning reminds of what housing communities should be like, wether in the city or the country. The rural feel that Taut aimed for did not need to come from the buildings

Friedman 4 themselves, and he succeeded in evoking nostalgia and coziness without betraying his unshakably modern sensibilities. His goal seemed to be to gradually lead the little man into the modern age, whereas his contemporaries at the Bauhaus aimed to shock them with sleek, white, clinical modernity. He did not indulge in this condescending tactic, and with eccentric color and the randomness that nature informs, he brought truth to the proletariats actual happiness. Of course, he did incorporate a fairly heavy-handed theoretical message, the bleedingly Communist red faades. But even this blatant expression, when balanced with the provincial elegance of the landscaping, which coyly references the UKs Garden City and Arts & Crafts movements, subtly and poignantly exemplify ethically and socially conscious housing design.

He continued to reconcile the strict Marxist belief in history with Utopian hopes for reality in Zehlendorf with Onkle Toms Hutte. He uses the flat faades as interestingly as possible, and roguishly allows the brick staircase to protrude. This gives each section considerable depth while still not lying about the inner structure. The asymmetrical window placement also aids in this effect. Eccentric window arrangements are not necessarily a rational decision, but Tauts design masterfully invites light and air where needed, as in the main rooms, and denies the light where it might be unappreciated or unnecessary. The unavoidable flat roofs here have aged well, especially in concert with the abundance of treetops that dont need over-hangs to effect a canopy over the neighborhood. The trees in the front yards were conserved in their original placement, which was important at construction, albeit less relevant now. When the first families moved in it was in everyones best interest that it felt as natural as possible with an

Friedman 5 underlying sense that this community belonged there. For the middle-class inhabitants of 2011, the remaining trees could have just as easily been planted with simulated randomness in 1926, and they would have the same naturalizing effect. But Taut was dealing with real-time issues and deadlines. Through subtle details in planning, he sincerely gave the lower classes as much of the opulent quaintness that he thought they deserved.

But the most unique form in the housing complex is also the most apparent, the fluid street plan that ripples up the hill from the southerly-adjacent Fischtal Park (Wiedenhoeft, 110). Most of the houses themselves squiggle perpendicularly from that baseline, but the streets, from which the actual inhabitants access the buildings, meander comfortably and naturally. He avoids the fact that this modern village is juxtaposed relatively hastily (not over the natural course of generations) by arranging them in a theoretically rural, and decidedly not cosmopolitan, way. All of his details correlate in a theoretical way that even the masses can understand.

The most startling of these details is his characteristically liberal use of primary colors. His use of polychromy is even more radical than in the Britz Estates because it seems to be arbitrarily fun. It is a stretch to attribute this to a superficial sense of humor, as Taut definitely took himself and his designs very seriously. But the deep, cosmic humor that the polychromy reveals comes from Tauts very humane understanding of art in the world. The admission of color onto Onkel-Toms Hutte proves that there is an inevitable disconnect between absolute theory and practice. For the Bauhaus school of thought,

Friedman 6 there was a futile hope and search for the Holy Grail of rationalism, as basic a building as could be. This aesthetic preoccupation with simplicity is saved by the real importance International Style architecture has had on the socialization of the world, but for the founding fathers, Gropius especially, these rules were total and universal. Gropius and his love of metallic colors, which are all just shades of black, is an early example of the Northern European ideal that makes Helvetica the most popular typeface of the Modern Age. For typographers, the perfect font expresses absolutely nothing, but mood depends entirely on the content, just as Modern buildings rely entirely on their inhabitants for life. But these people are tired. Onkel-Toms Hutte is a safe haven and the conditions that preceded its inception happened to be a war that was unfathomably modern in its destructive capabilities, which ushered in a definitively modern economic collapse and wave of inflation. Splashing life onto housing projects is an example that workers should follow, regardless of its intellectual sanctity. Whether it was intentional or not, the influence of expressionism that Taut allowed in his Modern design gave Onkel-Toms Hutte an aesthetic posterity that few buildings of that time enjoy, it still really looks new. The impeccably white products of most Modernists all have one thing in common: the curtains of dirt and water stains that nature gave as punishment for defying it. Phenomenologically, the stains are actually a decoration that the architects should have anticipated, and its precisely this that shatters the aura surrounding the white boxes when they were built. I say that Taut allowed the color specifically because of how natural it really is for people to want color. It is not inconsequential that the perfect expression of many designs was thought, by the designers, to really be in the design. Le Corbusier's prolific career that people bow to includes as many, if not more, sketches, than it does

Friedman 7 actual buildings. For all of Tauts preoccupation with extreme theory, he was proved right by the actual masses in his own time, and, during recent decades, a remarkably low turnover rate (Wiedenhoeft, 117). The colors still evoke the feel of different neighborhoods. Most detail on the entrances of the Reiherbeiz stretch of houses has since been customized, but with a post-modern brand of the conscious, subtle eccentricity that Taut expressed originally. His buildings are still alive.

The reality of building is that aesthetic statements are made even in the absence of certain decorations. International purists sought to make statements especially in this absence. The pre-war buildings of Taut, just as Gropius, implicated them with the architectural tradition that the two perforce regarded as the cause of the misfortunes of the past (Lane, 45.) They, with incontestable righteousness, worked for a new world order. Despite the radical change that many purely International developments offered to the public, the rules that governed such designs put them firmly in an historical context, and refered directly to the past in the violence that it did to them. Undoubtedly, they needed violence to be done to them. The Great War taught Taut and Gropius to distrust militarism (Lane, 45). If you translate that feeling to architecture, it would, logically, inform the ethical consciousness of the architects future housing projects. But, when you consider how the projects really feel to be around, the barrenness that this Second Wave worked to approach puts the movement squarely in the old form of simple opposition buried in the aesthetic vernacular of the West. One of the most basic semiotic clichs, White is good is at the center of the ultimate importance the International movement saw in clean, clear, white, dreams of pure functionality. This language implies that any

Friedman 8 eccentricity was irrelevant, even bad, because there had to be an essence untainted by the history of human error and gaudy taste. In considering the cultural importance of International style, even the purest, Gropius, did not transcend this language because of the unavoidable value system used in Architectural history. Gropius designs for standardized housing units, as well as The Britz development, included none of the old, favored traditions; No visible roofs, no base, and only the slightest of window frames (Lane, 35). The architects, through their buildings, were revolutionaries only in their total lack of reference to the past rather than their introduction of striking new forms (Lane, 35). But when considered for themselves, aesthetically, the sterility makes the housing projects dangerously close to seeming like military barracks. Most were content that the unconventional alignment of their buildings modular segments would distinguish these as cozy and fresh, not bland, as the white simplicity implied to the masses. It is obvious now, from the post-post-post-modern standpoint, that this clinical design style was not an end in itself, as much because of the amazing creative innovations that architects continue to generate as it is, unfortunately, because the extreme majority of design today inevitably refers to the pre-war traditions.

Taut worked toward an entirely new formal language, but did not believe that it would emerge as something you could consider in such an academic term as formal language. He cursed in the periodical, Dawn, this musty, threadbare, tattered old world of concepts, ideologies, systems (Lane, 46). Tauts Glashaus, even a year after the war, still fit pretty well in the scheme of his Alpine visions in colored glass, pure light, and crystal. He had been looking for ancient, esoteric wisdom, and it was this sensibility that

Friedman 9 enlivened Onkel-Toms Hutte in a completely appropriate way. The responsibility that the government conferred upon him as an architect was not in vain because Tauts vision was still deeply ingrained with the austerity and practicality of white boxes. While not exactly parallel to Mies, whose affinity for fat cigars and fine suiting didnt complicate his pure reputation, Tauts Berlin developments struck a special balance between the art and the artist. With only as much idiosyncracy included as needed, both projects were topically successful and have since earned the honorific title of UNESCO World Heritage Site. He combated the facades blandness with color and expressed the organic structural evolution of a community (Squiggly rows) in spite of the impression of massiveness and repetitiveness unavoidable in projects of [that] size (Lane, 109). The unavoidably boring nature of any ethical concept is exactly what makes Tauts architectonic humor resonate today.

Friedman 10 Works Cited/Bibliography Boyd White, Ian: Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism; Cambridge University Press 2010 De Heer: The architectonic colour: polychromy in the purist architecture of Le Corbusier; 010 Publishers, 2009 Miller Lane, B.: Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945; 1968 Schneider, Peter: The Wall Jumper; University of Chicago Press, 1982 Wiedenhoeft, R: Berlins Housing Revolution. German Reform in the 1920s; 1985 Wolfe, Tom: From Bauhaus to Our House; 1982