大ジードルンク・ブリッツにおけるブルーノ・タウトの色彩計画に関する考察

抄録

During the Weimar Republic era, German architect Bruno Taut planned many housing estates in Berlin, in which he used colors to enrich the inhabitants’ living environment. This paper discusses his color planning, focusing on the townhouses in sections one (1925-26) and two (1926-27) of the Britz housing estate in Berlin. As Taut did not give any concrete explanation about this color planning, we must consider his concept by analyzing the existing architecture. The author tries to clarify it by analyzing an architectural model made with the help of a field study.

This housing estate consists of three-story apartment houses and two-story townhouses, each of which has different color-planning characteristics. The former buildings have an eye-catching, unified coloration. On the other hand, the townhouses show a relatively random coloration consisting of four colors: dark red, yellow, white, and blue. The author pointed out the following characteristics of colors on the street-side walls of these townhouses:

• Taut used dark red most commonly as a fundamental color. The number of blue residences was small, and they were mainly located at the end of a building.

• He gave the townhouses arbitrary zigzag arrangements and changed colors where the houses followed this layout.

• He varied coloration from street to street. For example, in some townhouses, two colors alternated between every residence or every two residences, while some buildings were unicolored.

The author concluded that because there was no clear regularity in the color planning, it must have been laid out according to Taut’s sense of design.

However, by analyzing the architectural model, it became clear that his color planning seems to have changed in the short period of time between section one and section two. For example, the townhouses along Liningstraße in the area of section one show a unique coloration that is different from other streets, i.e., the whole building is colored blue. There are also buildings on this street on which two colors alternate between every house, like stripes, a coloration which is not found elsewhere. Moreover, on many townhouses in section one, the colors of the garden-side wall are different from those of the street-side wall, while most of the townhouses in section two have the same colors on both sides. Therefore, it can be said that the coloration of section two is more systematic than that of section one.

In order to consider Taut’s color planning of this housing estate in his whole career, the author tried to compare it to his other projects. Taut’s manner of architectural coloring changed from the 1910s to the 1930s. In an early project called Garden City Falkenberg (1913-16) he seemed to use colors freely, while the fifth section of the Onkel Toms Hütte housing estate (1930) shows a clear regularity in coloration. In the latter project, different colors were adopted according to the facing of the wall, i.e., he used green for the east walls and red for the west walls of houses because each color corresponded to the rising or setting sun. Taut's color planning gradually changed from arbitrary one to systematic one through his career. Hence, it seems reasonable to conclude that the change of coloration between the sections one and two of the Britz housing estate shows a process of development of Taut's manner of architectural coloring.