The City Crown by Bruno Taut

This book is the first English translation of the German architect Bruno Tauta€?s early twentieth-century anthology Die Stadtkrone (The City Crown). Written under the influence of World War I, Taut developed The City Crown to promote a utopian urban concept where people would live in a garden city of a€?apolitical socialisma€? and peaceful collaboration around a single purpose-free crystalline structure. Tauta€?s proposal sought to advance the garden city idea of Ebenezer Howard and rural aesthetic of Camillo Sittea€?s urban planning schemes by merging them with his own a€?city crowna€? concept. The book also contains contributions by the Expressionist poet Paul Scheerbart, the writer and politician Erich Baron and the architectural critic Adolf Behne. Although the original German text was republished in 2002, only the title essay of The City Crown has previously been translated into English. This English translation of Tauta€?s full anthology, complete with all illustrations and supplementary texts, fills a significant gap in the literature on early modern architecture in Germany and the history of urban design. It includes a translatorsa€? preface, introduction and afterword to accompany the original composition of essays, poems, designs and images. These original texts are accompanied by illustrations of Tauta€?s own designs for a utopian garden city of 300,000 inhabitants and over 40 additional historic and contemporary examples. The new preface to The City Crown explains the premise for the English translation of Tauta€?s anthology, its organization and the approaches taken by the translators to maintain the four different voices included in the original work. Matthew Mindrupa€?s introduction critically examines the professional and intellectual developments leading up to and supporting Bruno Tauta€?s proposal to advance the English garden city concept with a centralized communal structure of glass, the city crown. Through the careful examination of original documents, letter conversations and previous scholarship, Mindrup locates crucial sources and provides insights into the reasons behind Tauta€?s thesis. Where previous scholarship has sought to ascribe a single source for Tauta€?s a€?city crowna€? concept to such diverse architectural and spiritual leaders as Fischer, Landauer, Nietzsche and Eckhart, Mindrup argues that it evolved in a more complex way. During the months immediately following the end of World War I, The City Crown proved a source of inspiration for Taut and his colleagues in the Arbeitsrat fA?r Kunst (Working Council for Art) who were seeking to develop a new post-war German architecture. Ulrike AltenmA?ller-Lewis and Mark Bracka€?s afterword introduces the English reader to Bruno Tauta€?s life and career. The City Crown can be seen as turning point where Tauta€?s social and spiritual agendas became fully equal to the pragmatic and aesthetic impulses found in his work. The text also introduces the reader to more recent (and largely German) research on Taut. These reconsiderations of Tauta€?s theoretical work and personal development provide a fuller understanding of The City Crowna€?s impact on Tauta€?s career while placing the text more inclusively within the cultural landscape of the time.

Matthew Mindrup is Senior Lecturer of Architecture at the University of Sydney. An architect by training, Matthew completed a Ph.D. In Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech University in 2007 on the physical and metaphysical coalition of two architectural models assembled by Kurt Schwitters in the early 1920s. Dr Mindrup's ongoing research in the history and theory of architectural design locates and projects the implications that materials have in the design process. Dr. Mindrup has presented some of this research at conferences and published others in The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), Interstices, Wolkenkuckucksheim and his edited volume The Material Imagination: Reveries on Architecture and Matter from Ashgate Publishing. Ulrike AltenmA?ller-Lewis is Associate Professor at the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Prior to this position, she has taught at the Bauhaus-UniversitA?t Weimar in Germany and at the Washington Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech. Ulrike is a registered architect in the United States as well as in Germany and has practised in both countries. In 2008 she earned her Doctoral degree at the Bauhaus-UniversitA?t Weimar on contemporary school architecture in Finland. She investigated the correlation between pedagogical concepts and the spatial arrangements that best support teaching and learning. Ulrikea€?s ongoing research focuses on translations of seminal German texts on architecture as well as on educational buildings and the impact of the built environment on human wellbeing and performance. Ulrike has presented her findings at numerous national and international conferences and her writings have been published in the USA, Germany, Switzerland and Turkey.