In 1934, Walter and Ise Gropius, aided by the London-based architect Maxwell Fry, moved to England. Many people felt that the reason Gropius was desperate to flee Berlin, abandoning a practice that had enjoyed considerable success after he left the Bauhaus, was not just to get away from Nazi Germany but to separate Ise from Herbert Bayer—the same desire that had motivated him when he had left the Bauhaus six years earlier.
In 1937, with Marcel Breuer, the Gropiuses moved to the United States so Walter could teach at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He became an American citizen in 1944, and the following year founded The Architects’ Collaborative, known as TAC. Until his death, at age eighty-six, in 1969, he would spread his architectural vision not just across the United States, but throughout the world, although sometimes the results, like New York’s Pan Am Building, revealed hubris more than delicacy.
A younger architect at TAC described Gropius near the end of his life, when the Bauhaus founder, now in his eighties, was working on a gallery design in West Virginia:
Gropius had an unusual degree of determination and energy for his age, which was amply demonstrated the day we presented the schematic design to the Building Committee at the Gallery. The design was well received and Gropius then suggested that we all get stakes and string and lay out the building addition to see how it would “fit” on the landscape. The members of the Building Committee were surprised. It was midday in midsummer with the temperatures in the humid 90s, a time of year and time of day when most West Virginians would prefer to remain in the shade. Nonetheless, we found ourselves out in the noonday sun hammering stakes and measuring, urged on all the while by the untiring elderly architect with fire in his eye.
As a young associate at TAC, I was aware that Gropius did not always think of himself as an ordinary man who had to live by ordinary rules. He occasionally passed me on Route 2 on the way to work in his Nash Rambler, rather speedily I thought, his black french [sic] cap jauntily in place, and would disappear around the bend ahead of me in short order. He had loyalty to the Nash, not the most glamorous of cars, because Rambler had utilized the reclining front seats, the idea that he had originated in the design for the Adler car in Germany in the 1920s. But it was not until I began to travel with him for the Gallery that I became familiar with some unusual habits of his.
Gropius had an unrestrained compulsion to be first. He needed to be first on and first off airplanes, and he was unable to wait his turn on line. He would simply barge in front of everyone else impervious to embarrassment. …On board, Gropius invariably caused a flurry by unsnapping his seatbelt at the first screech of tires during those terrifying seconds when the plane is touching down, and he would head for the door while we still hurtled at break neck speed down the runway. He was first at the door despite admonitions by the attendants to remain in his seat until the plane had reached a full stop.190
Walter Gropius always lived according to his own rules.