Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German-American architect who founded the Bauhaus School and is considered a key figure in modernist architecture. He established the Bauhaus in Weimar and taught there, becoming a major advocate of the International Style. After leaving Germany for England in 1934, he moved to the United States in 1937, where he taught for most of his remaining years at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In America, he collaborated with Marcel Breuer on various projects and was a founding partner of the firm The Architects Collaborative. He received the AIA Gold Medal in 1959.

Born in Berlin, Gropius was the third child of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber, whose father was Prussian politician Georg Scharnweber. His great-uncle Martin Gropius designed the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin and followed Karl Friedrich Schinkel; Walter’s great-grandfather Carl Gropius, who fought at the Battle of Waterloo under Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, had once shared a flat with Schinkel.

In 1915, Gropius married Alma Mahler, widow of Gustav Mahler. Their daughter, Manon, was born in 1916 and died of polio at age 18 in 1935; composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in her memory. Gropius and Alma divorced in 1920, after she had begun a relationship with Franz Werfel. He married Ilse Frank, known as Ise, on 16 October 1923; they stayed together until his death. The couple adopted Beate Frank, called 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 actresses Marie and Bettina Burchard and of curator and art historian Wolf Burchard.

After four semesters studying architecture in Munich and Berlin, Gropius joined the office of Peter Behrens in 1908. Fellow employees included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Dietrich Marcks. He left Behrens in 1910 to start a practice in Berlin with Adolf Meyer. Together they designed the facade of the Faguswerk shoe last factory in Alfeld-an-der-Leine, a pioneering modernist building whose glass curtain walls illustrated the principle that form follows function and Gropius’s concern for healthy working conditions. The factory is now seen as a key early monument of European modernism. In 1913, Gropius designed a unique locomotive for the Prussian Railroad Locomotive Works in Königsberg, the first of its kind in Germany and possibly Europe. Other early works include the office and factory building for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne. His 1913 article “The Development of Industrial Buildings,” featuring photos of North American factories and grain elevators, strongly influenced European modernists like Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn.

World War I interrupted his career. Drafted in August 1914, he served as a sergeant major on the Western front, was wounded and nearly killed, and later became a lieutenant in the signal corps. He received the Iron Cross twice. After the German Revolution in 1918, he joined the November Group and the Workers Council for Art, radical artist groups seeking to transform art.

In the postwar period, Henry van de Velde recommended Gropius to succeed him as master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar. Gropius took over in 1919 and transformed the academy into the Bauhaus, attracting faculty including Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning, and Wassily Kandinsky. The Bauhaus aimed to bring beauty and quality to every home through well-designed industrially produced objects, with an experimental, theoretical emphasis. One product was the armchair F51, designed for the director’s room in 1920. In 1919, Gropius participated in the Glass Chain utopian expressionist correspondence under the pseudonym “Mass.” His Monument to the March Dead, designed in 1919 and executed in 1920, shows expressionist influence.