Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He was a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar and taught there for several years, becoming known as a leading proponent of the International Style. Gropius emigrated from Germany to England in 1934 and from England to the United States in 1937, where he spent much of the rest of his life teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In the United States he worked on several projects with Marcel Breuer and with the firm The Architects Collaborative, of which he was a founding partner. In 1959, he won the AIA Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in architecture.
Early life and family
Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third child of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber, daughter of the Prussian politician . Walter's great-uncle Martin Gropius was the architect of the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin and a follower of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, with whom Walter's great-grandfather Carl Gropius, who fought under Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo, had shared a flat as a bachelor.File:Monument to the March dead.jpg|thumb|Gropius's Monument to the March Dead was dedicated to the memory of nine workers who died in Weimar resisting the Kapp Putsch.
In 1915, Gropius married Alma Mahler, 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, in 1935, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her. Gropius and Mahler divorced in 1920.
Gropius married Ilse Frank, known as Ise, on 16 October 1923; they remained together until his death in 1969. The couple adopted Beate Frank known as Ati, the orphaned daughter of Ise's sister Hertha. Ise Gropius died on 9 June 1983 in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Walter's sister Manon Burchard is the great-grandmother of the German film and theater actresses Marie Burchard and, and of the curator and art historian Wolf Burchard.
Career
Early career (1908–1914)
In 1908, after studying architecture in Munich and Berlin for four semesters, Gropius joined the office of the architect and industrial designer 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.Gropius left the firm of Behrens in 1910 and established a practice in Berlin with fellow employee Adolf Meyer. Together they share credit for one of the pioneering 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.
The factory is now regarded as one of the crucial founding monuments of European modernism. Gropius was commissioned in 1913 to design a car for the Prussian Railroad Locomotive Works in Königsberg. This locomotive was unique and the first of its kind in Germany and perhaps in Europe.
Other works of this early period include the office and factory building for the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne.
Gropius published an article about "The Development of Industrial Buildings" in 1913, 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.
Gropius's career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He was drafted in August 1914 and served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years and then as a lieutenant in the signal corps. Gropius was awarded the Iron Cross twicePaul Davies, . Architectural Review. after fighting for four years. Gropius then, like his father and his great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, became an architect.
Bauhaus period (1919–1932)
Gropius's career advanced in the postwar period. Henry van de Velde, the master of the Grand-Ducal 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, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky.In principle, the Bauhaus represented an opportunity to extend beauty and quality to every home through well designed industrially produced objects. The Bauhaus program was experimental and the emphasis was theoretical. 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 1920, the Bauhaus was given its first major commission that would utilize almost all of the workshops in the school. This commission was for a house for Adolf Sommerfeld made from wood. The architectural designs for the house came from Gropius and Adolf Meyer. The Sommerfeld House was completed in 1921.
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. Facing political and financial difficulties in Weimar, Gropius and the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925 following an offer from the city. Gropius designed the new Bauhaus Dessau school building in 1925–26 on commission from the city of Dessau. He collaborated with Carl Fieger, Ernst Neufert and others within his private architectural practice. Gropius also designed the Master Houses in Dessau, along with the Törten Housing Estate which was built from 1926 to 1928. In 1927 he designed the Dessau City Employment office, but left the Bauhaus and Dessau before construction began. The City Employment office was completed in 1929. He also designed large-scale housing projects in Berlin, Karlsruhe that were major contributions to the New Objectivity movement, including a contribution to the Siemensstadt project in Berlin.
Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928 and moved to Berlin. Hannes Meyer took over the role of Bauhaus director. His work was also part of the architecture event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.
England (1934–1937)
The rise of Hitler in the 1930s would soon drive Gropius out of Germany. Before that, however, he did accept an invitation in early 1933 to compete for the design of the new Reichsbank building and submitted a detailed plan. He also designed furniture, cars, high-rise housing developments Siedlung and an unrealized Palace of the Soviets in Moscow.Gropius was able to leave Nazi Germany in 1934 with the help of Maxwell Fry on the pretext of making a temporary visit to Italy for a film propaganda festival; he then fled to the United Kingdom to avoid the fascist powers of Europe. Although not Jewish, his association with "degenerate" modern art despised by the Nazis meant he was obliged to emigrate when commissions dried up. He lived and worked in the artists' community associated with Herbert Read in Hampstead, London, as part of the Isokon group.
United States (from 1937)
Gropius and his wife Ilse arrived in the United States in February 1937, while their twelve-year-old daughter, Ati, finished the school year in England. The house the Gropiuses built for themselves in 1938 in Lincoln, Massachusetts was influential in bringing International Modernism to the US, 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." In designing his house, Gropius used the approach developed at the Bauhaus. The Gropiuses believed their house could embody architectural qualities similar to those practiced today, such as simplicity, economy, and aesthetic beauty.Helen Storrow, a banker's wife and philanthropist, became Gropius's benefactor when she invested a portion of her land and wealth for the architect's home. She was so satisfied with the result that she gave more land and financial support to four other professors, two of whom Gropius designed homes for. With the Bauhaus philosophy in mind, every aspect of the homes and their surrounding landscapes was planned for maximum efficiency and simplicity. Gropius's house received a huge response and was declared a National Landmark in 2000.
Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé 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 1938 he was appointed Chair of the Department of Architecture, a post he held until his retirement in 1952.. Encyclopædia Britannica. Gropius also sat on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Visiting Committee at the end of his career. The well-known architect designed the Richards and Child residence halls on the Harvard campus that were built in the 1950s. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Gropius was one of several refugee German architects who provided information to confirm the typical construction of German houses to the RE8 research department set up by the British Air Ministry. This was used to improve the effectiveness of air raids on German cities by the Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force in World War II. The research was to discover the most efficient way of setting fire to houses with incendiary bombs during bombing raids. The findings were used in planning raids such as the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943.