The founder of the influential Bauhaus school of architecture, Walter Gropius (1883–1969) built some of the twentieth century’s most critically acclaimed structures. His designs include the Pan Am Building in New York City, the US Embassy in Athens, Greece, and several buildings in Gropius’s adopted home of Massachusetts, to which he fled in 1934 after the Nazi takeover of his native Germany.
The Bauhaus style, which Gropius taught a generation of architects in Germany and later at Harvard, was typified by sleek designs, lack of ornamentation, and an emphasis on practicality and functionality. Along with Le Corbusier (1887–1965), Gropius is considered one of the most influential modernist architects, a group that simplified design and embraced the credo that in architecture, “form should follow function.”
The son of an architect, Gropius attended technical school in Munich and Berlin and began his own practice in 1910. One of his first major projects, a shoe factory, was constructed in 1913. He married the widow of composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Alma, in 1915 and served in the German army during World War I.
Returning home from the war after Germany’s defeat, Gropius joined a group of radical designers and architects in founding the Bauhaus, which was named after the Berlin school’s first director in 1919. The Bauhaus school rejected the ornate decorative style that was typical of classical European design—a symbolic rejection, too, of the militaristic politics that had led Germany to ruin in the war.
After fleeing Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) in 1934, Gropius settled in the Boston suburb of Lincoln, Massachusetts, where he designed a new home for himself. The house mixed traditional New England building methods with cutting-edge, industrial-style materials, creating one of the first modernist buildings in the United States. He also designed the Pan Am (now MetLife) Building, a controversial skyscraper completed in 1963 that rises over Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan.
Gropius died in Boston at age eighty-six, but his style of glass-and-steel construction and minimal design remains a dominant influence in skylines around the world.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- When Gropius resigned as director of the Bauhaus in 1928, he was replaced by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). Van der Rohe’s projects included the Seagram Building in New York City and the main public library in Washington, DC.
- The Bauhaus school offered instruction in both architecture and art. One of Gropius’s colleagues in Berlin was the Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinksy (1866–1944), one of the central figures in expressionist painting.
- After divorcing Gropius, Alma Mahler (1879–1964) married the novelist Franz Werfel (1890–1945). The story of her life, including her marriages to three significant artistic figures, was the subject of the 2001 movie Bride of the Wind. In the film, German actor Simon Verhoeven (1972–) played Gropius.
