Bruno Taut - After World War I

After World War I

The architect was forced out of Germany when the Nazis gained power. Taut was promised work in the USSR in 1932 and 1933, and came back to Germany in February 1933 to a hostile political environment. As a Jew with Social Democratic sympathies, he fled to Switzerland, then to Takasaki in Japan, where he produced three influential book-length appreciations of Japanese culture and architecture, comparing the historical simplicity of Japanese architecture with modernist discipline. He was the first to reveal the architectural features of Katsura Imperial Villa to the West, consequently influencing the work of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. Taut also did furniture and interior design work.

Offered a job as Professor of Architecture at "State Academy of Fine Arts" in Istanbul (currently, Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts), Taut relocated to Turkey in 1936. In Ankara he joined other German wartime exiles in Turkey, including Martin Wagner.

Before Taut's premature death in 1938, he wrote at least one more book and designed a number of educational buildings in Ankara and Trabzon after being commissioned by the Turkish Ministry of Education. The most significant of these buildings were the "Faculty of Languages, History and Geography" at Ankara University, "Ankara Atatürk High School" and "Trabzon High School". Taut's final work one month before his death was the catafalque used for the official state funeral of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on 21 November 1938 in Ankara.

He died on 24 December 1938 and was laid to rest at the Edirnekapı Martyr's Cemetery in Istanbul as the first and the only non-Muslim.