Gropius,Walter Adolph b. May 18, 1883; Berlin, Prussia d.July 5, 1969; Boston, Massachusetts
Father of the famed Bauhaus who became a leading catalyst for modernism in the United States.
Son of a government architect, Gropius studied architecture in technical institutes in Munich (1903-1904) and Berlin-Charlottenburg (1905-1907) as well as the University of Munich.
After travels to Spain in 1904 and 1905 and service in the German Imperial Army Hussars, he completed his education at the University of Berlin in 1907.He immediately joined the office of pioneering architect Peter Behrens (1868-1940) and until 1910 allied himself with fellow firm members Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier (nee Charles-Edouard Jeanneret). He struck out on his own in 1910 in Berlin, going beyond architecture to design of furniture, wall hangings, and railroad cars. Teaming with Adolph Meyer, he designed the Fagus Works (1911) in Alfeld-an-der-Leine and other model factory and office buildings in Cologne in 1914. World War I interrupted his activities, when Gropius was conscripted into the German Army from 1914 to 1918.
Amid it all in 1916, Gropius married the divorced wife of famed composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, Alma (nee Schindler). They had a daughter before divorcing. Gropius busied himself in 1918 as appointed director of the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Applied Arts and the Grand Ducal Academy of Arts in Weimar, merging the two in 1919 into the Staatliches Bauhaus (State Building School), the renowned school of arts and design, specializing in a revolutionary curriculum that included furniture and industrial design. He married again, to Ise Frank in 1923; and they too had a daughter.
Under growing political pressure, Gropius moved the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1925 and designed the modernistic school and faculty housing (1926). After Gropius’s 1928 resignation, his friend Mies took over in 1930.
Nazi pressure made the school move to Berlin in 1932 and close in 1933. But Gropius already was on his way out of Nazi Germany, visiting the United States to forge contacts before returning to a brief private practice in Berlin. Gropius won a 1929 election as vice president of the Congresses International of Architecture Modern (CIAM), serving in that position until 1957, two years before the CIAM disbanded. Sickened and stifled by Nazism, Gropius fled to England in 1934 to team with British architect Edwin Maxwell Fly on a major project, Village College in Im- pington, Cambridgeshire (1936), and smaller ones for houses.His international reputation became so great that, in 1937, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design offered him a professorship of architecture and then department chairmanship from 1938 to 1952, positions through which he made modernism the dominant international style for a generation of students and emulators, breaking the American architectural establishment away from the Beaux-Arts style. Gropius was happy to emigrate and helped his former Bauhaus colleague Marcel Breuer do the same in 1937, finding him a position at Harvard and collaborating in private practice in Cambridge until 1943, specializing in houses.
Gropius wanted architects to closely collaborate in teams and work toward a common goal. He recruited several young architects to form The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC, 1946) with a unique working structure of equal partners, each with his or her own projects critiqued by the others. Major projects included Harvard’s Graduate Center (1950), a dormitory complex; New York’s Pan-Am Tower (1963); the U.S. Embassy in Athens; and Baghdad University. TAC continued for several years after Gropius’s death.
Gropius had an immense influence on American architectural modernism through his extensive writings and lectures. Beyond many honorary degrees, including a Harvard doctorate of arts, Gropius won election to Phi Beta Kappa and a fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Royal Institute of British Architects awarded him its Gold Medal in 1956; the American Institute of Architects followed suit in 1959. The Federal Republic of Germany awarded him the Grand Cross of Merit with Star in 1958 and the Grand State Prize in Architecture in 1960.Blanche M. G. Linden
See also Bauhaus; Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig
References and Further Reading
Bayer, Herbert, Ise Gropius, and Walter Gropius, eds. Bauhaus, 1919—1928. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976.
Franciscono, Marcel. Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The Ideals and Artistic Theories of its Founding Years. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
Giedion, Sigfried. Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork. New York: Reinhold Publishing, 1954.
Gropius, Walter. The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. Boston: Charles T. Branford, 1955.
------. Scope of Total Architecture. New York: Harper, 1955.
Isaacs, Reginald R. Gropius: An Illustrated Biography of the Creator of the Bauhaus. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.