Drawing and reality: future realities
The fourth post in my series on ‘drawing and reality’, focusing on Bruno Taut‘s drawing from Alpine Architecture (1918)
Next, and briefer still, I want to talk about this drawing (or print of a drawing) from Bruno Taut’s Alpine Architecture, published in 1918. It is one of 30 annotated drawings (22 monochromatic and eight coloured plates) by Taut that present powerful vision of new city, perhaps even a new civilisation, in the mountains. The architectural vocabulary of fragmented steel and glass forms draws from Taut’s own ‘Glass Pavilion’ that was built for the Cologne Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition in 1914, yet expands the scale to that of a whole city.
While appearing distinctly modern, the city also draws in appearance from the natural geological forms. From this we might infer ideas about the possibilities of technology to evoke these natural forms in architecture and thereby more natural social structures — all of which is clearly conceived in opposition to the horrors unleashed by modern technology during the First World War. It is an image of modernism at its most utopian — a bold vision of a new world in stark contrast to the destruction and despair of Taut’s present reality.
A similar sensibility towards the transformative possibilities of architecture can, of course, also be found in Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse or even La Città Nuova by Antonio Sant’elia. What makes Taut’s vision so compelling is the way he depicts the Alpine city as somewhere in the distance, physically and temporally, somewhere that requires work, commitment, even devotion to reach. There is something distinctly messianic about the way it presents the city shining in the mountains, and is perhaps what Colin Rowe had in mind when he wrote that ‘Modern architecture is surely most cogently to be interpreted as gospel — as, quite literally, a message of good news: and hence its impact’.
The striving towards a better future reality, which Taut so vividly depicts, was the paradox that lay at the core of modernism: ‘an attitude’, again in Rowe’s words, ‘towards building which was divulging in the present that more perfect order which the future was about to disclose.’ Fittingly, therefore, Taut depicts not better life that modern architecture would bring but the architecture itself, taking it as read that the latter would necessarily lead to the former. However, when those futures were eventually reached their realties, a we now know, often played out quite differently to those originally imagined.
Continued in my next post…
© Owen Hopkins 2018
