Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Gropius

Walter Gropius (circa 1919). Photo by Louis Held

Personal information
Nationality German / American
May 18, 1883
Born
Berlin, Germany
July 5, 1969 (aged 86)
Died
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Peter Behrens (19081910)
Practice
The Architects' Collaborative (1945
1969)
Work

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 in Athens

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (May 18, 1883 July 5, 1969) was a German architect and
founder of the Bauhaus School[1] who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier,
is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.

[edit] Early life

Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third child of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste
Pauline Scharnweber. Gropius married Alma Mahler (18791964), 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 (Ilse) Frank (d. 1983), and they remained together until his death. They
adopted Beate Gropius, also known as Ati.

[edit] Early career

Walter Gropius, like his father and his great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, became an
architect. Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters
throughout 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, Le
Corbusier, 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 in Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe last
factory. Although Gropius and Meyer only designed the facade, the glass curtain walls of this
building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflects 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.
In 1913, Gropius published an article about "The Development of Industrial Buildings," which
included about a dozen photographs of factories and grain elevators in North America. A very
influential text, this article had a strong influence on other European modernists, including Le
Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn, both of whom reprinted Gropius's grain elevator pictures
between 1920 and 1930.[2]
Gropius's career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Called up immediately
as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years, and
was wounded and almost killed.[3]

[edit] Bauhaus period

Bauhaus (built 19251926) in Dessau, Germany

Walter Gropius's Monument to the March Dead (1921)

Gropius House (1938) in Lincoln, Massachusetts

Aluminum City Terrace (1944)

The Alan I W Frank House

Gropius's career advanced in the postwar period. Henry van de Velde, the master of the GrandDucal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar was asked to step down in 1915 due to his
Belgian nationality. His recommendation for 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 that included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef
Albers, Herbert Bayer, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky. One
example was the armchair F 51, designed for the Bauhaus's directors room in 1920 - nowadays a
re-edition in the market, manufactured by the German company TECTA/Lauenfoerde.
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 his famous door handles, now considered an icon of 20th-century
design and often listed as one of the most influential designs to emerge from Bauhaus. He also
designed large-scale housing projects in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Dessau in 1926-32 that were
major contributions to the New Objectivity movement, including a contribution to the
Siemensstadt project in Berlin.

[edit] After Bauhaus

With the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, Gropius was able to leave Nazi Germany in
1934, on the pretext of making a temporary visit to Britain. He lived and worked in Britain, as
part of the Isokon group with Fry and others and then, in 1937, moved on to the United States.
The house he built for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, (now known as Gropius House) was
influential in bringing International Modernism to the U.S. but Gropius disliked 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."[4]
Gropius and his Bauhaus protg Marcel Breuer both moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to
teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborate on projects including The Alan I
W Frank House in Pittsburgh and 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 published covering
his entire architectural career.