Walter Gropius

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Walter Adolph Gropius
Walter Gropius (circa 1920). Photo by Louis Held.
Personal Information
Name	Walter Adolph Gropius
Nationality	German
Birth date	May 18, 1883
Birth place	Berlin, Germany
Date of death	July 5, 1969
Place of death	Cambridge, Massachusetts
Work
Practice Name	Peter Behrens (1908–1910) The Architects' Collaborative (1945–1969)
Significant Buildings	Fagus Factory Factory Buildings at the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) Bauhaus Village College Gropius House Harvard Graduate Center University of Baghdad John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building Pan Am Building Interbau Wayland High School Embassy of the United States, Athens

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and founder of Bauhaus. Along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of "modern" architecture.

Contents 1 Life 2 Important buildings 3 Trivia 4 References 5 Further reading 6 See also 7 External links

[edit] Life

Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third son of a building advisor to the government with the same name, and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber (1855–1933) whose family owned a manor near the capital city.

Gropius married Alma Mahler (1879-1964), then widow of Gustav Mahler. Walter and Alma's daughter, named Manon after Walter's mother, was born in 1916. When Manon died of polio at age eighteen, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her (it is inscribed "to the memory of an angel"). Gropius and Alma divorced in 1920. (Alma had by that time established a relationship with Franz Werfel, whom she later married.) In 1923 Gropius married Ise Frank (d. 1983), and they remained together until his death.

Gropius, like his father and great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, was an architect. But all sources agree that Walter Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters all through his career. In school he hired an assistant to complete his homework for him. In 1908 Gropius found employment with the firm of Peter Behrens, one of the first members of the utilitarian school. His fellow employees at this time included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Dietrich Marcks. In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee Adolf Meyer established a practice in Berlin. Together they share credit for one of the seminal modernist buildings created during this period, the Faguswerk, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe last factory. The glass curtain walls of this building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflect function and Gropius's concern with providing healthful conditions for the working class. Other works of this early period include the office and factory building for the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) in Cologne.

Gropius's career was interrupted by the events of 1914. Called up immediately as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years.^[1] Ironically the war provided an opportunity which would advance his career during the post war period. Henry van de Velde, the master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar was asked to step down in 1915 due to his Belgian nationality. His recommendation of Gropius to succeed him led eventually to Gropius's appointment as master of the school in 1919. It was this academy which Gropius transformed into the world famous Bauhaus, attracting a faculty which included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbet Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Wassily Kandinsky. Students were taught to use modern and innovative materials and mass-produced fittings, often originally intended for industrial settings, to create original furniture and buildings.

Also in 1919, Gropius was involved in the Glass Chain utopian expressionist correspondence under the pseudonym 'Mass'. Usually more notable for his functionalist approach, the "Monument to the March Dead", designed in 1919 and executed in 1920, indicates that expressionism was an influence on him at that time.

In 1923, Gropius designed one of his most famous works, door handles, now considered an icon of 20th century design and often listed as one of the most influential designs to emerge from the Bauhaus.

Gropius fled Germany in 1934 due to the rising power of the Nazi Party, and lived and worked in Britain, at the Isokon project, and then, from 1937 to the United States, where his own house, the Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, was influential in bringing International Modernism to the US. Gropius did not like the term: "I made it a point to absorb into my own conception those features of the New England architectural tradition that I found still alive and adequate" (see [1]).

Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé Marcel Breuer both moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborate on the company-town Aluminum City Terrace project in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, before their professional split. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In 1945, Gropius founded The Architects' Collaborative (TAC) based in Cambridge with a group of younger architects. The original partners included Norman C. Fletcher, Jean B. Fletcher, John C. Harkness, Sarah P. Harkness, Robert S. MacMillan, Louis A. MacMillen, and Benjamin C. Thompson. TAC would become one of the most well-known and respected architectural firms in the world. TAC went bankrupt in 1995.

Gropius died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 86. Today, he is remembered not only by his various buildings but also by the district of Gropiusstadt in Berlin.

In the early 1990s, a series of books entitled The Walter Gropius Archive was publised covering his entire architectural career.

[edit] Important buildings

• the Fagus Factory, 1910–1911, Alfeld an der Leine, Germany
• Office and Factory Buildings at the Werkbund Exhibition, 1914, Cologne, Germany
• Bauhaus School and Faculty, 1925–1932, Housin, Dessau, Germany
• Village College, 1936, Impington, Cambridge, England
• The Gropius House, 1937, Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA
• Aluminum City Terrace housing project, 1942–1944, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, USA
• Harvard Graduate Center, 1949–1950, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (The Architects' Collaborative) [2]
• University of Baghdad, 1957–1960, Baghdad, Iraq
• John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building, 1963–1966, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Peter Thacher Junior High School, 1948
• Pan Am Building (now the Metlife Building), 1958–1963, New York, New York, with Pietro Belluschi and project architects Emery Roth & Sons
• Interbau Apartment blocks, 1957, Hansaviertel, Berlin, Germany, with The Architects' Collaborative and Wils Ebert
• The award-winning Wayland High School, 1961, Wayland, Massachusetts, USA
• Embassy of the United States, 1959–1961, Athens, Greece (The Architects' Collaborative and consulting architect Pericles Sakellarios)

[edit] Trivia

• Gropius was known to have a snappy sense of style and was often seen wearing a bowtie. Among his students was the writer and theorist Sigfried Giedion.

• Gropius recommended László Moholy-Nagy for his job at the Armour Institute of Technology.

• Walter Gropius and his wife Alma are mentioned in Tom Lehrer's song "Alma."

• Walter Gropius' "Bauhaus Village" is proposed by Lisa as a potential vacation destination for The Simpsons. Homer vetoes the suggestion, arguing that they would have to deal with the crowds.

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, 1955.
• The Scope of Total Architecture, 1956.

[edit] See also

• Walter Gropius buildings

[edit] External links

• Walter Gropius' house, Lincoln, Massachusetts
• On the Interbau apartments
• Impington Village College — only example of Gropius's work in the UK
• Fagus works (German)
• Bauhaus in America is a documentary film made in 1995 that reveals the influence of Gropius and others on American design and architecture.