Walter Gropius

Architect

• Born: May 18, 1883
• Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
• Died: July 5, 1969
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

German-born American architect

Considered one of the founders of modern architecture, Gropius worked to make architecture and art responsive to the needs of an urbanized and industrialized society. His major projects were in urban and industrial architecture and in industrial design. He also designed educational programs in both modern architecture and industrial design.

Areas of achievement Architecture, education

Early Life

Walter Gropius (GROH-pee-uhs) was born into a family with an architectural and artistic tradition. His father was an architect involved in city planning. His great uncle was an architect of distinction, a student and colleague of the classical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The young Gropius always knew he wanted to be an architect. He was deeply influenced by two developments he witnessed firsthand: the rapid expansion of Berlin from a city of 800,000 in 1871 to one of nearly 3 million in 1914 and the emergence of Germany as Europe’s greatest industrial power. Everywhere, Gropius saw the problems created by rapid urbanization and industrialization: dark, inefficient factories; squalid, unsanitary housing; household and industrial products shoddy in construction and ugly in design. The problem, as Gropius saw it, was that architecture and the architect had become divorced from engineering, science, and technology; art and the artist had become separated from design and craftsmanship. For Gropius, they were inseparable and should be reunited.

Finding the curriculum at the Technical Institute in Berlin irrelevant, Gropius continued his architectural training in Munich but failed to take the degree. He always maintained he learned more from reading, observing, and working in the studios of architects than he did from formal studies. Gropius was fortunate in obtaining a position in the studio of Peter Behrens, one of the outstanding architects of the time.

Life’s Work

Two innovative designs, modern in the sense of being free of eclecticism and ornamentation, established Gropius as one of Europe’s outstanding young architects. The first, a factory building completed in 1911, used glass and steel in an innovative way. Gropius reduced the walls to screens of glass suspended from a steel frame, thereby emphasizing their nonstructural function; he cantilevered the floors, thereby eliminating the traditional corner supports. A definitive resolution of architectural design and engineering technique, the building was of amazing lightness but at the same time sturdy, handsome, and functional. Gropius’s other design, a model, combining factory, garage, and administration building and using the same innovative techniques, including cantilevered stairs dramatically encased in transparent glass silos, was a major attraction in an exhibition held in 1914 in Cologne.

The 1914-1918 war, in which Gropius served with distinction, interrupted his career but gave him the opportunity to reconsider his goals. For Gropius, the war had destroyed the old order not only in politics but also in architecture and art. It was a time for new beginnings. Gropius’s opportunity came as early as 1915, when the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar asked him to head the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. Gropius accepted the post in 1919 and shortly thereafter combined the school with the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts to create the Bauhaus a great educational invention with far-reaching effects on art, architecture, and design. The Bauhaus, which can be translated as “house of creative constructions,” was primarily an idea. Gropius sought to reunite architecture with technology and science, and art with design and handicraft. Because of the troubled economic conditions in Germany, which precluded expensive architectural creations, the major emphasis was on art, industrial, and product design.

Gropius refused to see technology, science, and the machine as enemies. His answer to modernity was more modernity. The machine had become the great medium of artistic creation. The task of the architect and artist was not only to understand but also to master and utilize all three. To his school Gropius attracted some of the greatest names in modern art artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and László Moholy-Nagy. Students could work in a wide number of areas, from typography and poster design to ceramics, metals, and fabrics. All students had to take introductory courses in the structure and creative possibilities of basic materials such as stone, fiber, glass, or wood and in the logical structure of an artistic creation. All students worked alternately under the supervision of a craftsman and an artist. All students had to produce a design suitable for mass production.

Considering its short life, the production of the Bauhaus was considerable, and many of its designs, such as the tubular steel chair, are now commonplace. Finding the atmosphere at Weimar increasingly hostile, Gropius moved the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1925 and designed for it an integrated group of buildings considered among the finest examples of modern architecture. Gropius always believed buildings to be the supreme artistic creation a combination of architecture, art, painting, sculpture, and design. The Bauhaus buildings were palpable evidence.

Gropius created a variety of product designs from spoons to automobile bodies, but his first love was always architecture. During the Bauhaus period, in addition to the buildings of the school, he designed low-cost workers’ housing using prefabricated panels, a plan for the Chicago Tribune Tower that was not adopted, and an imaginative design for a “total theater” in which the proscenium arch was eliminated, thereby eliminating too the barrier between actors and audience. Movable panels enabled the theater to be turned into one with a deep or narrow stage or to become a theater-in-the-round.

Facing increased opposition from the rising tide of right-wing fanaticism in Germany, Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928 to work as an independent architect in Berlin. Continuing his work in urban housing and planning, Gropius developed slab apartment houses long, narrow high-rises placed in parklike settings at angles designed to maximize the availability of light and air. Gropius disliked the peripheral design of traditional city blocks with their lightless airshafts and rear courts, with one side never receiving sunlight. For workers, Gropius designed less expensive but equally pleasant row, or ribbon, housing, one apartment wide and two or three stories high. In addition to light and air, he planned for trees, flowers, and greenery, of which ordinary workers were usually deprived. Gropius also worked on developing prefabricated parts that could be used to produce individualized, creative housing.

The Nazi takeover of power in 1933 ended Gropius’s career in Germany. The new totalitarian state could not tolerate a free spirit such as his. Using a theatrical conference in Italy as a pretext, Gropius and his wife in 1934 left for Rome and from there went to England as exiles.

Gropius’s stay in England was short but productive. His design for a college became the prototype for much of England’s post-World War II academic architecture. In 1937, he accepted an invitation to become professor of architecture at Harvard University. The following year, he became chair of the department of architecture at the Graduate School of Design. He now embarked on the second most important phase of his career, again involving education.

Gropius turned the Harvard architectural school into the most influential in the world. The major emphasis was on social commitment, social criticism, teaching, and counseling. His objective was to foster free spirit and creative thinking. Gropius had no desire for disciples or smaller editions of himself. As in the Bauhaus years, he found time for architectural designs. As he had done throughout his career with the exception of the Bauhaus buildings, Gropius always worked with other architects as well as artists, engineers, and builders. Most of his projects in the United States were done working with The Architects Collaborative (TAC), an organization that included some of his former students.

Gropius always asked what the social and economic utility of a projected design would be. Many of his admirers believed that because of collaboration and social commitment, the creative aspect of his work suffered. Gropius, however, deplored the egotism of some of his better-known colleagues and maintained that if it were a question of the importance of the container or the contained, the latter must take precedence. He conceived of a building not as a monument but as an impersonal instrument, a receptacle for the flow of life. Probably his most important design of the Harvard years was that of the Harvard Graduate Center.

Gropius’s work inevitably inspired copyists, and styles called International or Bauhaus developed and were attributed to him. Gropius deplored the trend and repeatedly stated that introducing a definitive style was not his intention, but rather a methodology or ideas that would fulfill a need or resolve a problem as effectively and as expeditiously as possible.

Gropius left Harvard in 1952, again to devote himself to architecture. Major projects that resulted were the Grand Central City Building in New York, the American Embassy in Athens, and the spectacular University of Baghdad in Iraq. True to the work ethic of his Prussian background, Gropius worked to the last. He helped design a glass factory in 1968; he died the following year. Gropius was married twice. His first marriage, to Alma Schindler Mahler, ended in divorce. He was survived by his second wife, the former Ise Frank.

Significance

Gropius’s greatness must be seen in context with what he called collaborative, or total, architecture that is, architecture involved with technology, science, other arts, economic and social utility, and the environment. To this should be added the psychological element, for Gropius was convinced that art or beauty was part of the human psyche, as was a relationship to nature. Gropius saw the gap not only between architecture, science, and technology, between art and craftsmanship, but also between human beings and the environment. Gropius was an environmentalist before the word came into common usage. Narrowing that gap was the objective of his professional work and social commitment. He submerged his own creative talents by collaborating with others; he sacrificed fame and monetary rewards in favor of teaching; and he disavowed architectural dogma and style in favor of methodology. Gropius should be remembered as much for his humanity as for his architecture.

Bibliography

Bayer, Herbert, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius, eds. Bauhaus, 1919-1928. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938, 1952. This is both a guide to and overview of the important exhibit the museum mounted in 1938 on the work of the Bauhaus. In addition to informative essays by authorities in the field, of particular value are the many detailed illustrations that give some indication of the wide scope of Bauhaus work and design.

Fitch, James Marston. Walter Gropius. New York: George Braziller, 1960. This short book is probably the best general introduction to Gropius and his work. Succinct and readable, it covers Gropius’s career in his capacities as educator, architect and designer, and social critic. The many annotated illustrations cover both Gropius’s completed projects and his designs.

Gay, Peter. Art as Act: On Causes in History: Manet, Gropius, Mondrian. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. A distinguished historian, as part of a lecture series, analyzes Gropius from the viewpoint of a “cause” in history. Entitled “Imperatives of Crafts,” Gay supports Gropius’s thesis of the need for the reuniting of art and craft. Of particular interest is the relation of Gropius’s work to earlier architects such as Schinkel and to contemporaries such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Completed after Gropius’s death, the essay covers his entire career.

Giedion, Sigfried. Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork. New York: Reinhold, 1954. Reprint. New York: Dover Publications, 1992. Probably the most comprehensive book in English on Gropius, prepared by a professional and obvious admirer. The book is divided into two parts: text and illustrations. The text is comprehensive and covers Gropius’s career from its beginning to 1953 and includes all of his major projects. Detailed illustrations cover not only completed projects and designs but also many of his industrial and product designs.

Gropius, Walter. Scope of Total Architecture. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952. A relatively short but important collection of essays, speeches, and reviews on architectural education, the contemporary architect, housing, and what is meant by total architecture. What becomes evident is Gropius’s great breadth of interest, the strength of his convictions, and his combative assertiveness. Of particular interest is the essay “The Architect Servant or Leader?”

Lupfer, Gilbert, and Paul Sigel. Walter Gropius, 1883-1969: The Promoter of a New Form. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2004. Concise overview of Gropius’s architecture containing essays, most important works described in chronological order, biography, and bibliography. Part of the World’s Greatest Architects series.

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