Walter Gropius

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Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius (circa 1919). Photo by Louis Held

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius
Born
May 18, 1883
Berlin, German Empire
July 5, 1969 (aged 86)
Died
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nationality German/American
AIA Gold Medal (1959)
Awards
Goethe Prize (1961)

Peter Behrens (19081910)

Practice
The Architects' Collaborative (1945
1969)
Buildings
Fagus Factory
Werkbund Exhibition (1914)
Bauhaus

Gropius House
University of Baghdad
J.F. Kennedy Federal Building
Pan Am Building
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, Le Corbusier and
Frank Lloyd Wright, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.

Contents

1 Early life

2 Early career (1908-1914)

3 Bauhaus period (1919-1932)

4 Post Bauhaus (1933-1945)

5 Death

6 Legacy

7 Selected buildings

8 References

9 Further reading

10 External links

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 18, 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).

Early career (1908-1914)

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]

Bauhaus period (1919-1932)

Bauhaus (built 19251926) in Dessau, Germany

Walter Gropius's Monument to the March Dead (1921) dedicated to the memory of nine workers
who died in Weimar resisting the Kapp Putsch
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 product of the Bauhaus 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.

Post Bauhaus (1933-1945)

Gropius House (1938) in Lincoln, Massachusetts

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 with Harry Seidler in Sydney, 1954

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.

Death
Gropius died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 86.

Legacy
Today, Gropius 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. The CD audiobook Bauhaus Reviewed
1919-33 includes a lengthy English Language interview with Gropius.
Upon his death his widow, Ise Gropius, arranged to have his collection of papers divided into
early and late papers. Both parts were photographed with funds provided by the Thyssen
Foundation. The late papers, relating to Gropius' career after 1937, and the photos of the early

ones, then went to the Houghton Library at Harvard University; the early papers and photos of
the late papers went to the Bauhaus Archiv, then in Darmstadt, since reestablished in Berlin.[5]
In 1959 he received the AIA Gold Medal.

Selected buildings

Aluminum City Terrace (1944)

The Alan I W Frank House

19101911 the Fagus Factory, Alfeld an der Leine, Germany

1914 Office and Factory Buildings at the Werkbund Exhibition, 1914, Cologne, Germany

1921 Sommerfeld House, Berlin, Germany designed for Adolf Sommerfeld

1922 competition entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition

19251932 Bauhaus School and Faculty, Housin, Dessau, Germany

1936 Village College, Impington, Cambridge, England

1936 66 Old Church Street, Chelsea, London, England

1937 The Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA

1939 Waldenmark, Wrightstown Township, Pennsylvania (with Marcel Breuer)

19421944 Aluminum City Terrace housing project, New Kensington, Pennsylvania,

USA

19491950 Harvard Graduate Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (The Architects'

Collaborative)[6]

19451959 Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, USA - Master planned 37-acre
(150,000 m2) site and led the design for at least 8 of the approx. 28 buildings.[citation needed]

19571960 University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq

19631966 John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

1948 Peter Thacher Junior High School,

1957-1959 Dr. and Mrs. Carl Murchison House, Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA (The
Architects' Collaborative)

19581963 Pan Am Building (now the Metlife Building), New York, with Pietro
Belluschi and project architects Emery Roth & Sons

1957 Interbau Apartment blocks, Hansaviertel, Berlin, Germany, with The Architects'
Collaborative and Wils Ebert

1960 Temple Oheb Shalom (Baltimore, Maryland)

1960 the Gropiusstadt building complex, Berlin, Germany

1961 The award-winning Wayland High School, Wayland, Massachusetts, USA

(demolished 2012)

19591961 Embassy of the United States, Athens, Greece (The Architects' Collaborative
and consulting architect Pericles A. Sakellarios)

1968 Glass Cathedral, Thomas Glassworks, Amberg

1967 69 Tower East, Shaker Heights, Ohio, this was Gropius' last major project.

The building in Niederkirchnerstrae, Berlin, known as the Gropius-Haus is named for Gropius'
great-uncle, Martin Gropius, and is not associated with Bauhaus.

References

1.

^ Bauhaus, The Tate Collection, retrieved 2008-05-18

2.

^ American Colossus: the Grain Elevator 1843-1943, Colossus Books, 2009.

american-colossus.com

3.

^ "Walter Adolph Gropius 1883 - 1969". British Broadcasting Corporation.

Retrieved 2006-08-02.

4.
5.

^ Gropius House by Walter Gropius

^ "Gropius, Walter, 1883-1969. Additional papers". Houghton Library, Harvard
University, Online Finding Aid. Retrieved June 4, 2012.

6.

^ Harvard Graduate Center - Walter Gropius - Great Buildings Online

Further reading

The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, 1935.

The Scope of Total Architecture, Walter Gropius, 1956.

From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe, 1981.

The Walter Gropius Archive, Routledge (publisher), 19901991.

External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Walter Gropius
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Walter Gropius

Designer portrait on rosenthalusa.com

More information on Gropius's early years at the Bauhaus can be found in his
correspondence with Lily Hildebrandt, with whom he had an affair between 1919-22:
Getty Research Institute, California.

Bauhaus Reviewed 1919-33 audiobook liner notes at LTM

Authorit
y control

VIAF: 24663766

Categories:

Bauhaus

German architects

American architects

Modernist architects

20th-century architects

Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty

German emigrants to the United States

German military personnel of World War I

People from the Province of Brandenburg

1883 births

1969 deaths

Artists from Berlin

Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal

History of Anhalt

Black Mountain College faculty

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