Walter Gropius
Gropius founded the Bauhaus school in 1919, where art, craft and industry were to be united. He designed the Bauhaus Building in Dessau and in 1934 fled the Nazis, first to England and then to Harvard.
Walter Gropius was born in 1883 in Berlin into a family of architects; his great-uncle Martin Gropius had designed the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin. He studied architecture at the technical universities in Munich and Berlin but never took a degree. From 1908 to 1910 he worked for Peter Behrens, who designed factories and products for the electrical company AEG, and there he met both Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. He then opened his own practice with Adolf Meyer. Gropius was involved early on in the Deutscher Werkbund, which sought to unite art and industry. During the First World War he served as an officer at the front and was wounded, and the war changed his view of society.
Gropius and Meyer designed the Fagus Factory in Alfeld, 1911–1913, whose glazed façades without corner columns made it one of the first modernist buildings. In 1919 Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar, a school where art, craft and later industry were to be united. When the school moved to Dessau in 1925 he designed its building, with glazed workshops and wings arranged by function, as well as the Masters’ Houses and the Törten housing estate. He left the Bauhaus in 1928 and designed housing in Berlin, including at Siemensstadt. His ideas concerned standardisation, industrial building, and light, air and sun in the home. He advocated teamwork rather than the individual artist-architect.
After the Nazis seized power Gropius left Germany in 1934, first for England and in 1937 for the United States, where he became head of the architecture programme at Harvard. He built his own house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and founded the practice The Architects Collaborative. His students included many of the leading architects of the post-war period. He died in 1969. The Bauhaus became a symbol of modern design, and its buildings in Dessau and Weimar are World Heritage Sites. In Sweden the Bauhaus ideas were important to the functionalists around the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 and the 1931 manifesto “acceptera”, and the idea of standardised, rational building shaped the housing policy of the Swedish welfare state, the folkhem, and the industrialised construction of the Million Programme.