The Crown of the City

A Utopian Architectural Vision by Bruno Taut: The City Crown

Bruno Taut's work, The City Crown, which is among the important books in 20th-century architectural literature, has been published as Arketon Publications' second Taut book. Like the first book, An Architectural Theory, Taut's work was translated into Turkish by Hüseyin Tüzün. The City Crown, which can be described as an "architectural utopia," also includes texts by Paul Scheerbart, Adolf Behne, and Erich Baron. An important feature of the book is its extensive use of visuals in the narrative. In this Turkish edition, as in An Architectural Theory, all visuals have been renewed. The renewal process involved accessing original copies for some and entirely re-creating others.

In the "Foreword" of the book, Aykut Köksal states in summary: "The City Crown stands apart among all architectural utopias. What makes it unique is that it is not merely a presentation of the proposed model; conceptual development also carries significant weight. For this reason, it can even be said to be closer to social or literary utopias than architectural ones. For the same reason, the representation of the utopian model is accompanied by visuals of structures selected from different times and geographies. The fact that the authors whose texts Taut included in the book mostly come from non-architectural disciplines is due to the same reason. These authors, yearning for a more perfect world, are Paul Scheerbart, Adolf Behne, and Erich Baron. The publication date of The City Crown is 1919. Bruno Taut was one of the overshadowed architects of Germany in the early 20th century; The City Crown is Taut's first book published after World War I. Taut was 39 years old when the book was published.

The City Crown is not alone among Bruno Taut's utopian-era works; Alpine Architecture, dated 1919, is also one of the works from this period. Among Taut's sources of inspiration in these years, we can count Ebenezer Howard's 1897 Garden Cities of To-morrow and Nietzsche's texts. It would not be wrong to say that these ideas were influential in Taut's assigning a sublime task to the architect in the construction of a new society. The City Crown should also be read as an expression of this expectation in a specific context.

We can say that this improved and renewed version of The City Crown, with its enhanced visuals, is one of the most meticulously prepared editions among all those published to date in any language."