GROPIUS HOUSE
Courtesy of Historic New England
68 Baker Bridge Road
Lincoln, MA 01773
Phone: 781-259-8098
www.historicnewengland/homes/GropiusHouse/gropius-house
“We want to create the purely organic building, boldly emanating its inner laws, free of untruths or ornamentation.”
— WALTER GROPIUS
Walter Gropius (1883–1969) was a German architect and for some years a founding director of the German school known as the Bauhaus. In 1937 he accepted a post on the faculty of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and the following year he applied his design principles when he built this house for himself and his wife Ise.
The list of guests who stayed here is a virtual who’s who of twentieth-century contemporary design: Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Marcel Breuer, and more. Walter died in 1969, and Ise passed in 1983. The house and its contents were bequeathed to Historic New England.
Though many of the building materials (wood, brick, and fieldstone) are those common to New England buildings, the house in many ways departs from tradition. It is a simple design, and it has a flat roof and an interior with an open floor plan.
The Gropius House contains art by Henry Moore, Joan Miro, and others, and the furniture is the work of Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen, and Yori Yanagi, all masters of modern art and design.
Nearby, also in the town of Lincoln, there is another property of Historic New England, Codman Estate, which dates to about 1740 (www.historicnewengland.com).