Bruno Julius Florian Taut (4 May 1880 – 24 December 1938) was a renowned German architect, urban planner and author.

[citation needed] He created glass-treaded metal staircases, a waterfall with underlighting, and colored walls of mosaic glass.

Taut designed an immense circular garden city with a radius of about 7 km (4.3 mi) for three million inhabitants.

[1] Taut completed two housing projects in Magdeburg from 1912 through 1915, which were influenced directly by the humane functionalism and urban design solutions of the garden city philosophy.

In contrast to the pure-white entries from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, Taut's house (Number 19) was painted in primary colors.

"[3] During the November Revolution of 1918, Taut was involved in the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, an association of revolutionary artists based on council democracy.

The group assumed the "primacy of architecture", demanded the demolition of all war memorials and saw art as a means of revolutionizing society.

From March 1919, Taut belonged to their three-man management team, along with Adolf Behne, César Klein and Walter Gropius.

[4] In 1924 Taut was made chief architect of GEHAG, a Berlin public housing cooperative, and was the main designer of several successful large residential developments ("Gross-Siedlungen") in Berlin, notably the 1925 Hufeisensiedlung ("Horseshoe Estate"), named for its configuration around a pond, and the 1926 Onkel-Toms-Hütte development ("Uncle Tom's Cabin") in Zehlendorf, named for a local restaurant and set in a thick grove of trees.

The designs featured controversial modern flat roofs; access to sunlight, air, and gardens; and generous amenities like gas, electric light, and bathrooms.

For a time Taut worked as an industrial design teacher, and his models of lamps and furniture sold at the Miratiss shop in Tokyo.

[7] Taut was noted for his appreciation of the stark, minimalist vein of Japanese architecture found at the Ise Shrine and the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto.

Contrasting it with the elaborately decorated shrines of shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu at Nikkō, Tochigi, he famously said that "Japan's architectural arts could not rise higher than Katsura, nor sink lower than Nikko".

[8] Taut's writing on the Japanese minimalist aesthetic found an appreciative audience in Japan and subsequently influenced the work of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.

In Ankara he joined other German wartime exiles, including Martin Wagner and Taut's associate Franz Hillinger, who arrived in 1938.

"[citation needed] He proceeded to design his own house in İstanbul's Ortaköy neighborhood, bridging the architectural traditions of his exile existence.

Taut's final work, one month before his death, was the catafalque that was used for the official state funeral of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on 21 November 1938 in Ankara.