Glass Pavilion

Bruno Taut – Glass Pavilion, Exhibition of the Werkbund Cologne, Germany, 1914

The Glass pavillon (in Italian Padiglione di vetro ) was built in 1914 to a design by Bruno Taut, on the occasion of the Exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund in Cologne.
A very important chapter of architecture, not only from Tautiana, but from the twentieth century, the Glaspavillon was erected in Cologne, in the Ruhr area, in 1914 on the occasion of the exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund, a German exhibition aimed at "ennobling industrial work" in the attempt to extinguish the caesura present between the architecture and the applied arts through the construction of buildings with marked artisan qualities.

Working on the project were Bruno Taut, at the time a thirty-four-year-old semi-unknown architect, and Franz Hoffmann: both erected the Pavilion at their own expense, without the invitation of the patriarchs and official organizers of the Werkbund, in a marginal area of ​​the exposure (Taut spoke of it in terms of "an anonymous place, outside and far from the entrance gates of the actual exhibition … with which the exposure, in its seriousness, precluded any contact between itself and that desecrating object ; in the immediate vicinity of the amusement park "). At the Deutscher Werkbund, in fact, the most fervent architectural geniuses of Europe coagulated: just think of names like Theodor Fischer, Peter Behrens, Henry van de Velde, Josef Hoffmann, Walter Gropius. To the Wilhelminian pathos of the other pavilions, or to their icy rigor, Taut nevertheless opposed a structure dominated by glass, which he considered for his dazzling potentialities the constructive material of the future.