Walter Gropius

1883 Berlin
1969 Boston

The very first building designed by the architect Walter Gropius, the Fagus Works in Alfeld an der Leine (1911-1925), became an icon of the New Architecture. Moreover, Walter Gropius' personality and the influence he exerted as an architect and designer are inextricably bound up with the Bauhaus. He studied architecture in Munich in 1903 and from 1905 until 1907 in Berlin without taking a diploma. From 1908 until 1910 he worked in Peter Behrens' practice at the time when the AEG Turbine Hall was being planned and built; Gropius, however, was not in on that project personally. From 1910 to 1925 Gropius had his own architecture practice in Berlin, where his manager and most important employee was the architect Adolf Meyer. In 1910 W. Gropius joined the Deutscher Werkbund, where he joined Henry van de Velde in initially protesting against design standardization and calling for individual creativity to be encouraged. Gropius was supposed to become director of the applied arts school Henry van de Velde founded in Weimar but never took up the appointment because the school closed down in 1915. Walter Gropius then designed a concept for merging the Kunstgewerbeschule with the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste, a move intended to create a new, modern teaching facility that would function as a consultancy for industry, commerce, and the crafts trades. This concept laid the cornerstone for the Staatliche Bauhaus Weimar, whose director from 1919 until 1927 was W. Gropius. Blessed with a charismatic personality, Gropius succeeded in attracting numerous progressive artists to teach at his school. From the outset, close collaboration with industry was on the agenda; the individual Bauhaus workshops were to design models, samples, and types for industrial mass production. Through them the workshops were supposed to become financially independent. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, Walter Gropius designed the new Bauhaus building, which in turn made a powerful architectural statement in its own right. The Masters' Houses were also built after Walter Gropius' designs in 1925/26. Walter Gropius embarked on designing public housing in 1926 with the large-scale Törten housing project near Dessau (1926-1928). After leaving the Bauhaus, Gropius and his practice continued to specialize in such large-scale housing projects, for which standardized forms were developed, including, in 1928/29, the Karlsruhe-Dammerstock settlement and, in 1929/30, the Siemensstadt settlement in Berlin. In 1937 he was invited to Massachussets to teach at Harvard. Walter Gropius continued his prolific career, building a great many houses, especially private houses like the 1938 Gropius House. In collaboration with Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius built the Pennsylvania Pavilion for the 1929 New York World's Fair. In 1946 Walter Gropius founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC). TAC is also the name of a tea service Walter Gropius designed in 1969, which is still being made by Rosenthal.

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