Walter Gropius

(click to enlarge)
Walter Gropius, photograph by Erich Hartmann. (credit: Erich Hartmann/Magnum Photos)

(born May 18, 1883, Berlin, Ger. — died July 5, 1969, Boston, Mass., U.S.) German-U.S. architect and educator. The son of an architect, he studied in Munich and Berlin and in 1907 joined the office of Peter Behrens. In 1919 he became director of the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar. He designed a new school building and housing for the Bauhaus when it moved to Dessau (1925); with its dynamic International Style composition, asymmetrical plan, smooth white walls set with horizontal windows, and flat roof, the building became a monument of the Modernist movement. In 1934 Gropius fled Germany for Britain, and in 1937 he arrived in the U.S, taking a position at Harvard University. At the Bauhaus and as chair (1938 – 52) of Harvard's architecture department, he established a new prototype of design education, which ended the 200-year supremacy of the French École des Beaux-Arts. Among his most important ideas was his belief that all design — whether of a chair, a building, or a city — should be approached in essentially the same way: through a systematic study of the particular needs and problems involved, taking into account modern construction materials and techniques without reference to previous forms or styles.

For more information on Walter Adolph Gropius, visit Britannica.com.

The German-American architect, educator, and designer Walter Gropius (1883-1969) was director of the famed Bauhaus in Germany from 1919 to 1928 and occupied the chair of architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1938 to 1952.

Walter Gropius was born in Berlin on May 18, 1883. Although he studied architecture in Berlin and Munich (1903-1907), he received no degree. He then went to work in Berlin for Peter Behrens, one of several German architects who was influenced by the British Arts and Crafts movement and who attempted to go further by adapting good design to machine production.

In 1910 Gropius set up practice with Adolf Meyer. They designed the Fagus Works in Alfeld an der Leine (1911) and the office building at the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne (1914), using a combination of masonry and steel construction, from which, in some areas, the external glass sheathing was hung. The plan of the Cologne building was axially designed in the Beaux-Arts tradition, but the major influence was predominantly that of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose "prairie houses" were widely known in Europe through the 1910 and 1911 publications of Ernst Wasmuth in Berlin. Gropius and Meyer were influenced by Wright's style especially in the horizontality and the wide overhanging eaves, but also in the symmetry, the corner pavilions, and the whole spirit of Wright's concept. World War I interrupted their architectural practice, and thereafter they designed only one project prior to Meyer's death in 1924:the unsuccessful entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition of 1922.

The Bauhaus

During the war Gropius was invited to become the director of the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Applied Arts and the Saxon Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar, and he took up his duties at war's end. He combined the two schools into the Staatliches Bauhaus (State Building House) in 1919. The aim of the Bauhaus was a "unity of art and technology" to give artistic direction to industry, which was as lacking in 1919 as in the mid-19th century, when the Arts and Crafts movement began. The greatness of Gropius as an educator was that he did not put forward any dogmatic policies, but rather he acted as a balance between the rational, representative, and physical on the one hand and the spiritual, esthetic, and humanitarian on the other. An artistic community of prima donnas is difficult to coordinate, but Gropius acted as choreographer and exacted the best from his faculty, from the mysticism of Johannes Itten to the Marxist socialism of Hannes Meyer.

When right-wing criticism forced the Bauhaus to leave Weimar in 1925, Gropius designed the structure for the new Bauhaus in Dessau, one of his finest works, which embodied a new concept of architectural space. When criticism mounted there against him as director in 1928, he resigned rather than allow the criticism to spread from him as leader to the whole institution. (Nazism and the Bauhaus stood for diametrically opposing viewpoints, and in 1933 under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe the school, which had moved to Berlin, was forced to close.)

Gropius practiced in Berlin from 1928 to 1934, experimenting with prefabricated housing in his Toerten housing development in Dessau (1926) and dwellings at the Werkbund Exhibition (1927). He went to England in 1934, where he worked with E. Maxwell Fry until 1937, designing mainly individual houses, but also Impington College, Cambridgeshire. This structure partially influenced the post-World War II school design program in Britain.

Works in America

When Gropius went to the United States in 1937, he collaborated with Marcel Breuer, a former pupil, on individual and group housing, including a house for himself at Lincoln, Mass. (1937). Gropius held the chair of architecture at Harvard from 1938 to 1952, a period of his life from the age of 55 to 69, when most architects would have been designing their major works. This was due to his intense commitment to the educational process. "I have been 'nobody's baby' during just those years of middle life which normally bring a man to the apex of his career, " Gropius admitted, when he received the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal in 1959.

Gropius had, however, established The Architects' Collaborative (TAC), a group-oriented practice, in 1946, and he retired from Harvard in 1952 to devote his full attention to the practice of architecture. TAC and Gropius designed the Harvard University Graduate Center (1949-1950); executed a project for the Boston Back Bay Center (1953), which was not carried out; and designed the U.S. Embassy in Athens (1960) and Baghdad University in Iraq (begun 1962 but incomplete as of 1971).

Gropius also designed locomotives and railroad sleeping cars (1913-1914), the Adler automobile (1930), and a host of everyday products. He believed in "the common citizenship of all creative work."

Further Reading

Works on Gropius include Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork (1954); Gilbert Herbert, The Synthetic Vision of Walter Gropius (1959); and J. M. Fitch, Walter Gropius (1960). Studies of the Bauhaus are L. Hirshfeld-Mack, The Bauhaus (1963), and Hans M. Wingler, Bauhaus (1969), which is the most detailed and comprehensive study. For bibliographies of Gropius's works see American Association of Architectural Bibliographers, Walter Gropius: A Bibliography, prepared by Caroline Shillaber (1965), and William B. O'Neal, Walter Gropius (1966).

Additional Sources

Isaacs, Reginald R., Gropius: an illustrated biography of the creator of the Bauhaus, Boston:Little, Brown, 1991.

A leading German architect, designer, and educator, Gropius was one of the most influential figures of Modernism. His ideas were promoted through membership of the Deutscher Werkbund and participation in its critical debates, his directorship of the ideologically powerful Bauhaus in the years after the First World War, and emigration to Britain and then the USA in the 1930s. He began his architectural studies in Munich in 1903, followed by a period in Berlin from 1905 to 1907. From 1908 to 1910 he worked in Peter Behrens's Berlin studio (where Mies Van Der Rohe and later Le Corbusier were also based for a while), after which he set up in business with Adolf Meyer, a partnership that lasted until 1925. An early influential building designed by Gropius and Meyer was the Fagus Factory (1911-14). Its clean lines and standardized elements influenced the form of his model factory building at the 1914 Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Cologne, where he also exhibited a railway compartment. He had also been involved in the design of furniture and a diesel locomotive for the Königsberg locomotive factory. After the First World War he was a leading figure in the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers' Council for Art), before being appointed as director of the Staatliches Bauhaus School in Weimar in 1919, effectively a merger of the former schools of fine and applied arts. This new institution brought together an exciting blend of teachers and students, embracing a wide range of avant-garde aesthetic ideas. His own response to such ideas could be seen in his designs for his office in 1923, especially the lamp which owed a debt to Gerrit Rietveld. However, the Bauhaus was often viewed with suspicion by municipal authorities and was consequently subject to considerable political challenge, a position which led to Gropius' resignation in 1928. Following a visit to the USA to study housing, he established his own practice, designing modular furniture and Adler automobiles. In 1929 he was made vice-president of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne. In the following year, with the help of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy he organized the Werkbund exhibition at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in Paris. The theme of the exhibit was the design and furnishing of a ten-storey hotel, Gropius planning the steel-framed structure and communal spaces such as a gallery/library and a coffee bar. In the face of increasing political hostility to Modernist ideas and organizations such as the Deutscher Werkbund he left Germany for London in 1934, where he worked with the architect Maxwell Fry. Living in the Modernist Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, London, designed by Wells Coates he also designed for the Isokon group, becoming its director in 1936. He emigrated to the USA in the following year, becoming the head of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University until 1952. He also worked with Breuer from 1937 to 1944, founding a new practice, The Architects Collaborative (TAC), in 1946. Amongst his best-known designs of this period were two porcelain tea services in 1969 for Rosenthal, for whom he also designed two factories.

German-born naturalized American architect, best known for promoting International Modernism both as practitioner and educator. He worked with Behrens in Berlin (1907–10) before setting up his own practice. His earliest significant work (with A. Meyer) was the Fagus Factory, Alfeld-an-der-Leine (1911), a three-storeyed steel-framed structure with glass curtain-walls, one of the first buildings in which the beginnings of the International Modern style were displayed. For the Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne (1914—again with Meyer), he designed the administrative building with curved glazed towers enclosing the staircases (an influential motif throughout the 1920s and 1930s), but otherwise the building had a stripped Neo-Classical simplicity, certain aspects of it were reminiscent of Wright's work, and its plan resembled the Ptolemaïc temple of Horus, Edfu, Egypt. Through van de Velde, Gropius was given the opportunity in 1915 to direct the Gross-herzoglich-Sächsische Kunstgewerbeschule (Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts) at Weimar, but was prevented by the war from taking this up. In 1918 Gropius joined in the euphoria following the collapse of the monarchial system, and, with Taut, was active in promoting Modernist and left-wing ideas: he was involved in the Novembergruppe and Arbeitsrat für Kunst which combined efforts, out of which grew Die Gläserne Kette. Seeing the Weimar possibilities as a means by which he could promote Leftist ideology, he sought those who might be able to confirm the 1915 offer, and in 1919 became Director not only of the former Grand-Ducal Kunstgewerbeschule, but of the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst (High School for Fine Arts), which he amalgamated under the new title of Das Staatliche Bauhaus Weimar (the Weimar State House of Building). Influenced by the De Stijl movement and by his own belief in industrialization and mass-production, the Bauhaus moved inexorably away from a craft-oriented ethos to one of industrial design.

When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Gropius designed the buildings (completed in 1926) that became a paradigm for the International Modernist style. Even while at the Bauhaus, Gropius continued in practice with Meyer, designing the Sommerfeld House, Berlin-Dahlem (1921–2), made of teak from a scrapped warship, an Expressionist memorial at Weimar (1922), and the Jena State Theatre (1923). In 1927 he designed buildings for the Werkbund Housing Exhibition at Stuttgart, the Weissenhofsiedlung. He resigned as Bauhaus Director in 1928, and laid out the Siemensstadt Housing Estate, Berlin (1929–30), designing two of the apartment-blocks himself: with long strip-windows set in smooth rendered walls, they were widely imitated. As an active member of CIAM his proposals for high-rise housing in green areas were disseminated, and became part of Modernist orthodoxy. His own moderate left-wing views and the more overtly Communist political stance adopted by Hannes Meyer at the Bauhaus had repercussions, and even though he registered with the Nazi-created Reichskulturkammer (State Chamber of Culture) and designed a recreational and cultural centre (unrealized) for the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) Nazi movement (a project that invoked images of gigantic Party junketings worthy of a Nuremberg Rally), he failed to obtain major commissions.

In 1934 he settled in England where he lived in Lawn Road Flats, Hampstead, designed by Wells Coates, was involved in the MARS group, and worked with Maxwell Fry, designing the film laboratories at Denham, Bucks. (1936), Wood House, Shipbourne, Kent (1937), 66 Old Church Street, Chelsea (1935–6), and Impington Village College, Cambs. (1936), the lost his main contribution to architecture in England. He was also consultant (1934–5) to the Isokon Company, headed by Jack Pritchard (1899–1992), which had built the Hampstead flats to Coates's designs. In 1937, however, Gropius accepted the offer of a post at Harvard in the Graduate School of Design, and in 1938 became Chairman of the Department of Architecture there, at once expunging all Beaux-Arts traditions, an event followed at architectural schools throughout the USA. With Breuer he designed the Gropius House, Lincoln, Mass. (1937), the first monument of International Modernism in New England, which was followed by several more private houses, culminating in the Frank House, near Pittsburg, PA (1939). With Wachsmann, Gropius evolved systems for constructing prefabricated houses (1943–5).

After the 1939–45 war Gropius went into partnership with several younger architects, forming The Architects Collaborative (TAC), which produced the Graduate Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (1949–50). For the Hansaviertel (Hansa Quarter), Berlin, Gropius designed an apartment-block (1957), and in the 1960s the new town of Britz-Buckow-Rudow, Berlin, was laid out to plans by him. He was probably the most influential architectural pedagogue of all time, but many aspects of his pronouncements and teachings were being questioned in the late C20 and early C21, as the environments created as a result of his influence have not proved to be either agreeable or functional.

Bibliography

• Argan (1975)
• Berdini (1994)
• Fitch (1960)
• Franciscono (1971)
• Gropius (1913, 1945, 1952, 1962, 1965, 1968)
• Gropius & Harkness (eds.) (1966)
• Herdeg (1985)
• F.Hesse (1964)
• Hüter (1976)
• Isaacs (1983–4)
• Kentgens-Craig (1999)
• Kentgens-Craig (1998)
• Lane (1985)
• O'Neal (ed.) (1966)
• Probst & Schädlich (1986–8)
• Sharp (1993)
• H.Weber (1961)
• Wingler (1969)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

A German-born twentieth-century architect who was a founder of the Bauhaus school. After 1937 he lived in the United States and taught at Harvard University, where he continued to advocate Bauhaus principles, particularly the use of functional materials and clean, geometric designs. His work greatly influenced modern architecture. (See functionalism.)

Quotes:

"A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of an authentic democracy."

"Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as salon art. Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith."

"If your contribution has been vital there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off, and that will be your claim to immortality."

Walter Adolph Gropius
Walter Gropius (circa 1920). Photo by Louis Held.
Personal information
Name	Walter Adolph Gropius
Nationality	German / American
Birth date	May 18, 1883(1883-05-18)
Birth place	Berlin, Germany
Date of death	July 5, 1969 (aged 86)
Place of death	Cambridge, Massachusetts
Work
Practice	Peter Behrens (1908–1910) The Architects' Collaborative (1945–1969)
Buildings	Fagus Factory Factory Buildings at the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) Bauhaus Village College Gropius House Harvard Graduate Center University of Baghdad John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building Pan Am Building Interbau Wayland High School Embassy of the United States in Athens

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus^[1] School who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Early career 3 Bauhaus period 4 After Bauhaus 5 Important buildings 6 References in popular culture 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links

Early life

Bauhaus (built 1925–1926) in Dessau, Germany.

Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third child of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber. Gropius married Alma Mahler (1879-1964), 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 eighteen, 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.) In 1923 Gropius married Ise (Ilse) Frank (d. 1983), and they remained together until his death. They adopted Beate Gropius, also known as Ati.

Early career

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

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. Students were taught to use modern and innovative materials and mass-produced fittings, often originally intended for industrial settings, to create original furniture and buildings. One example 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.

1921, Walter Gropius's Monument to the March Dead

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, aided by Gareth Steele, 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.

After Bauhaus

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, 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" (see^[4] ).

Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé Marcel Breuer both moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborate on 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.

Gropius died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 86. Today, he 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.

Important buildings

Gropius House (1938) in Lincoln, Massachusetts

• 1910–1911 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
• 1925–1932 Bauhaus School and Faculty, Housin, Dessau, Germany
• 1936 Village College, Impington, Cambridge, England
• 1937 The Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA
• 1942–1944 Aluminum City Terrace housing project, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, USA
• 1949–1950 Harvard Graduate Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (The Architects' Collaborative)^[5]
• 1945–1959 Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, USA - Master planned 37-acre site and led the design for at least 8 of the approx. 28 buildings.^{[citation needed]}
• 1957–1960 University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq
• 1963–1966 John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• 1948 Peter Thacher Junior High School,
• 1958–1963 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)
• 1961 The award-winning Wayland High School, Wayland, Massachusetts, USA
• 1959–1961 Embassy of the United States, Athens, Greece (The Architects' Collaborative and consulting architect Pericles A. Sakellarios)
• 1967– 69 Tower East Shaker Heights, Ohio, this was Gropius' last major project.

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

References in popular culture

Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (January 2009)

• Tom Lehrer's comedic song "Alma" recounts the three husbands of Alma Werfel, including Gropius. Lehrer mentions Alma's marriage to Gropius following the death of her first husband, composer Gustav Mahler.
• In Edward Abbey's 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, Doc Sarvis, upon stumbling into an ant pile, says "Thus I refute R. Buckminster Fuller. Thus do I refute Paolo Soleri, B.F. Skinner, and the late Walter Gropius."

See also

• Walter Gropius buildings
• Bauhaus
• Gropius in Chicago Coalition

References

1. ^ Bauhaus, The Tate Collection, retrieved 2008-05-18
2. ^ http://www.american-colossus.com/ American Colossus: the Grain Elevator 1843-1943 (Colossus Books, 2009) www.american-colossus.com
3. ^ "Interview with Walter Gropius". British Broadcasting Corporation. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/gropiusw2.shtml. Retrieved 2006-08-02. 
4. ^ Gropius House by Walter Gropius
5. ^ Harvard Graduate Center - Walter Gropius - Great Buildings Online

Further reading

• The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, 1955.
• The Scope of Total Architecture, Walter Gropius, 1956.
• From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe, 1981.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Walter Gropius

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Walter Gropius

• Walter Gropius' house, Lincoln, Massachusetts
• Packaged House by Konrad Wachsmann and Walter Gropius - an overview with slideshow.
• On the Interbau apartments
• Impington Village College — only example of Gropius's work in the UK
• Fagus works (German)
• Copper Houses by Walter Gropius - an overview with slideshow
• Bauhaus in America is a documentary film made in 1995 that reveals the influence of Gropius and others on American design and architecture.
• 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.
• Baukasten by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer - an overview with slideshow.

Persondata
NAME	Gropius, Walter Adolph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	German architect and founder of Bauhaus
DATE OF BIRTH	May 18, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH	Berlin, Germany
DATE OF DEATH	July 5, 1969
PLACE OF DEATH	Cambridge, Massachusetts

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