ブルーノ・タウトと煉瓦 : その意識化の契機

In his book Japanese Houses and Lives, Bruno Taut discusses how the Japanese daiku (carpenter) is comparable with the Western mason (which is sometimes translated as wall workers in Japan), an artisan ferro-concrete who builds houses and other structures. However, when Taut arrived in Japan in 1933, he was sometimes introduced to people as a kind of sakan (plasterer). This might be one reason why few people hired him to do construction work during his stay in Japan. The misunderstanding of his profession was caused by a difference in the construction traditions of Japan and the West. Generally speaking, the Western mason builds by piling up bricks, while the Japanese carpenter builds by erecting pillars and putting a roof on top of them. Taut enrolled in the Königliche Baugewerksschule (the Royal School for Professional Construction) and graduated in March 1901 with excellent grades. The school’s name had various translations into Japanese, which caused confusion when it came to understanding the kind of work its graduates did. Construction work was traditionally done by professional people trained in private workshops. The school’s system for construction was then rather new both in Europe (where it started around the beginning of the nineteenth century) and in Japan (where it started in the third quarter of the century). Taut wrote in his Vitae (the book referred to above) that he had graduated in 1902. It is not known why he claimed to have graduated a year later than he actually did. Was it just a mistake, or did he think of his activities in Hamburg and Wiesbaden in 1902 as merely a trial run? These cities were renowned as places where “brick expressionism” in architecture-which was derived from the new medievalism of the nineteenth century-had flourished. In 1903, Taut began working in the Berlin office of Bruno Möhring, a specialist in the new building methods that combined steel and masonry and used them in ephemeral, eye-catching designs for exhibition pavilions. During that year, Taut often went to Chorin, a town which had the ruins of an old cloister that stood near a lake and that had been built using medieval masonry techniques, and this derelict structure might have given him new ideas for the use of bricks. In his well-known Glass Pavilion (1914) he used not only glass and steel effectively but also masonry materials like brick and tiles, items whose cubic forms resonated with the Jugentstil (modern style) designs and the currents of Cubism like those seen in Robert Delaunay’s Orphism. Brick was a material that always stimulated Taut and that he periodically abandoned but then returned to.

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