GROPIUS, WALTER 1883-1969

ARCHITECT

Founder of the Bauhaus

Walter Gropius's philosophy, his functionalist designs, and his renowned teaching abilities profoundly influenced the modern movement in Western architecture. As chairman of the Department of Architecture in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, he headed the top architecture school in the United States from 1938 to 1952. Under his direction Harvard architecture students began learning by doing, a technique he applied at the Bauhaus, the German school of architecture and design he had established in the early 1900s. While at Bauhaus, Gropius made a name for himself in architecture, furniture design, industrial design, and city planning. Other examples of his work include residences, housing developments, prefabricated houses, theaters, academic buildings, and factories constructed in the United States, Germany, and England.

Early Life

Walter Adolf Gropius was born on 18 May 1883 in Berlin, Germany, to a family long associated with architecture and painting. Having intended from an early age to become an architect, Gropius volunteered to work in the firm of Solf and Wichards at the Technische Hochschule in Munich. After serving in the military and later traveling through Europe, Gropius established his own practice in 1910. He designed factories and residences noted for their clean, functional lines, their austerity, and for the unusual materials he used, such as cement and steel.

Fascination with the Machine

After World War I Gropius became the director of the Grand Ducal Saxon school of arts and crafts in Weimar, Germany, which he later reorganized into the Staatliches Bauhaus. "The foundation and development of the Bauhaus," he wrote in The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (1935), "aimed at the introduction of a new educational method in art and a new artistic conception that derived development of all artistic form from the vital functions of life and from modern technical means of construction." Gropius was one of the first architects to take inspiration from modern technology and felt strongly that designers must explore the design elements the machine made possible. "The object of the Bauhaus," he wrote, "was not to propagate any 'style,' system or dogma, but simply to exert a revitalizing influence on design." He brought in leading names in painting, typography, furniture, ceramics, weaving, stage design, and other applied arts.

Emigrating from Fascism

In 1928 Gropius resigned the directorship of the Bauhaus to go into private practice in Berlin, where he designed important institutional structures. As chairman of the design committee of the Adler automobile company (1929–1933) he also designed automobile bodies. Dismayed at Adolf Hitler's Germany, Gropius left for London in 1934. In 1937 he and Marcel Breuer moved to the United States to complete a three-year project in Massachusetts. Over the next two years the two designed their own houses in Lincoln, Massachusetts; the Hagerty House in Cohasset, Massachusetts; the Abele House in Framingham, Massachusetts; and the Frank House in Pittsburgh. They also did projects for the Pennsylvania state exhibition at the New York World's Fair in 1939 and for Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

Harvard

In 1937 Gropius was named senior professor of architecture at Harvard University, and in 1938 the chair of the department where he trained a generation of architects. In 1941 the federal government commissioned him to design a 250-unit defense-housing project, Aluminum City, in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Gropius and Breuer provided the units at a cost of $3,280 each. Many critics believe Gropius's most significant American building was the Harvard Graduate Center (1950) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Designed by the Architects' Collaborative—a firm in which Gropius was one of eight partners, some of whom were his former students-—the Graduate Center was a testimony to modern architecture. In July 1952 Gropius retired from his position at Harvard.