Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius
Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

Founder of the Bauhaus.

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919 and designed the school's building in Dessau. He fled to the United States and taught at Harvard.

Walter Gropius was born in Berlin in 1883 into a family of architects. He studied architecture in Munich and Berlin but never took a degree. Between 1908 and 1910 he worked for Peter Behrens, who designed factories and products for the electrical company AEG and was a pioneer of industrial design.

Together with Adolf Meyer he designed the Fagus Factory in Alfeld, a shoe-last factory of 1911 whose corners were made of glass without supporting columns. It is regarded as one of the first modern buildings and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2011. During the First World War Gropius served as a soldier. From 1915 to 1920 he was married to Alma Mahler, widow of the composer Gustav Mahler.

In 1919 he founded the Bauhaus in Weimar by merging an art school and a school of arts and crafts. The aim was to unite art, craft and, later, industry. The teachers included Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten. When the school was forced to move in 1925, he designed its new building in Dessau, opened in 1926, with a glass façade over the workshop wing. He left the Bauhaus in 1928 to work as an architect and designed housing estates, among other things.

When the Nazis came to power he emigrated to England in 1934 and to the United States in 1937, where he became professor and head of the architecture programme at Harvard. He influenced an entire generation of American architects. He founded the practice The Architects Collaborative, which built among other things the Pan Am Building in New York, now the MetLife Building, which became controversial for its size. His own house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, is a museum.

Gropius died in Boston in 1969. He was married to Ise Gropius, who was an important collaborator. He is seen as one of the founding figures of modernism, and the Bauhaus has shaped education in design and architecture all over the world.