Other Information
Manufacturer
Vitra has manufactured furniture designs by Charles & Ray Eames and George Nelson since 1957. Building on this foundation over the years, the company has developed a wide range of furnishings for the office, for the home and for public spaces in collaboration with progressive designers. Yet Vitra is more than just a design-oriented manufacturing company. The name also stands for the Vitra Design Museum, for a collection of modern furniture and its accompanying archive, for workshops and publications on topics of design, and for an architectural concept that unites buildings by Frank Gehry, Nicholas Grimshaw, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Alvaro Siza, Herzog & de Meuron and SANAA at the Vitra Headquarters in Birsfelden (Switzerland) and on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein (Germany). Click Here for More Vitra Products >>>
Designer
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. He died in 1938 in
Istanbul.
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