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Alpine Architecture

Year: 2020

360-degree film

Alpine Architecture, named after the work of the Berlin architect Bruno Taut (1880-1938), takes a series of architectural sketches of the same name, made by Taut in 1919, as a starting point for exploring the construction of virtual worlds and the new possibilities of virtual architecture and VR. The VR piece is at once an adaptation of the original sketches as well as an extension of Taut’s work into new dimensions.

Taut was a German Expressionist architect, a movement which came to prominence in the latter years of World War One. One of the key works of this movement is Alpine Architecture, drawn as a response to the violence and man-made destruction of the war. The work sought to reject a world built upon machine-led industrialisation and instead turned to a more naturalistic form of architecture to re-establish a world based on geological and ecological synthesis.

Although the work remains obscure outside of architecture, it remains a key work of the expressionist movement and testifies to important artistic and social currents at the time that sought to place architecture and the built environment at the centre of societal change.