ABSTRACT
The war experience seems to have given Bruno Taut license to intensify the more radical aspects of his work; during this period, his aesthetics became fantastic and utopian, and his social project extreme. Unlike the many German youths who rushed to enlist during the heady August days of 1914, Taut held back, for he was a pacifist who railed against the war, calling it a "wicked ghost", "hopeless stultification", and "an epidemic of mental disorder". At around 1916, he began working on his breakthrough books, Stadtkrone and Alpine Architektur. In Stadtkrone, Taut developed social reform themes and visions of glass architecture alongside the garden-city planning concepts he had begun to explore in his prewar projects, but in Alpine Architektur, which combines a mystical text with stunningly colorful illustrations of a utopian world, he broke into truly new territory. Alpine Architektur is divided into five sections: Crystal House, Architecture of the Mountains, Alpine Building, Earth Bark Construction, and Star Building.
