Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School. Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright are usually called the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He was a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar (1919). Gropius was also an important architect of the International Style.

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Portrait by Louis Held, c. 1919
Personal information
Name	{{{name}}}
Birth date	(1883-05-18)18 May 1883
Birth place	Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire
Date of death	5 July 1969(1969-07-05) (aged 86)
Place of death	Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Work
Buildings	Fagus Factory Werkbund Exhibition (1914) Bauhaus Gropius House University of Baghdad J.F. Kennedy Federal Building Pan Am Building
Awards	AIA Gold Medal (1959) Albert Medal (1961) Goethe Prize (1961)

Legacy

Gropius is popular from both his buildings and the district of Gropiusstadt in Berlin. In 1959, he was given the AIA Gold Medal. In the early 1990s, multiple books called The Walter Gropius Archive were published. These books talked about his entire career. On May 17, 2008, Google Doodle celebrated Walter Gropius' 125th birthday. In 1996, Gropius' Bauhaus Building and the Master Houses were made UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Popular buildings

• 1906 granary in Jankowo, Western Pomerania, Poland
• 1910–1911 the Fagus Factory, Alfeld an der Leine, Germany
• 1914 Office and Factory Buildings at the Werkbund Exhibition, 1914, Cologne, Germany
• 1921 Sommerfeld House, Berlin, Germany designed for Adolf Sommerfeld
• 1922 competition entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition
• 1925–1932 Bauhaus School and Meisterhäuser (houses for senior staff), Dessau, Germany
• 1926–1928 Törten housing estate in Dessau.
• 1927-1929 Dessau Employment Office (Arbeitsamt).
• 1936 Village College, Impington, Cambridgeshire, England
• 1936 66 Old Church Street, Chelsea, London, England
• 1937 The Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA
• 1939 Waldenmark, Wrightstown Township, Pennsylvania (with Marcel Breuer)
• 1939–1940 The Alan I W Frank House, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (with Marcel Breuer)
• 1942–1944 Aluminum City Terrace housing project, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, USA
• 1945–1959 Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, USA – Master planned 37-acre (150,000 m²) site and led the design for at least 8 of the approx. 28 buildings.
• 1949–1950 Harvard Graduate Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (The Architects' Collaborative)
• 1957–1960 University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq
• 1963–1966 John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• 1948 Peter Thacher Junior High School,
• 1957–1959 Dr. and Mrs. Carl Murchison House, Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA (The Architects' Collaborative)
• 1958–1963 Pan Am Building (now the Metlife Building), New York, with Pietro Belluschi and project architects Emery Roth & Sons
• 1957 Interbau Apartment blocks, Hansaviertel (Walter-Gropius-Haus) Berlin, Germany, with The Architects' Collaborative and Wils Ebert
• 1960 Temple Oheb Shalom (Baltimore, Maryland)
• 1960 the Gropiusstadt building complex, Berlin, Germany
• 1961 The award-winning Wayland High School, Wayland, Massachusetts, USA (demolished 2012)
• 1959–1961 Embassy of the United States, Athens, Greece (The Architects' Collaborative and consulting architect Pericles A. Sakellarios)
• 1968 Glass Cathedral, Thomas Glassworks, Amberg
• 1967–1969 Tower East, Shaker Heights, Ohio, was Gropius's last major project.
• 1968–1970 Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, West Virginia, USA. Original building expanded with Gropius addition with little alteration to the original structure. Only American art museum to be brought to completion using a Gropius design.
• 1973–1980 Porto Carras, at Chalkidiki, Greece, was built posthumously from Gropius designs, it is one of the largest holiday resorts in Europe.

Gallery

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  Bauhaus Dessau building, built 1925–1926

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  Gropius House (1938) in Lincoln, Massachusetts

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  The Alan I W Frank House

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  Aluminum City Terrace (1944)

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  A front view of the remaking of Gropius's house in Dessau (1925--1926). It was destroyed during World War II.

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  Part of the Törten Housing Estate (Siedlung Dessau-Törten) designed by Gropius (1926-1928).

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  Dessau Employment Office (Arbeitsamt) designed by Gropius in 1927. It was built between 1928 and 1929.

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  The Gropius House (1938) in Lincoln Massachusetts.

Walter Gropius Media

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  Gropius in 1918, with his wife Alma Mahler and their daughter, Manon.

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  Gropius's Monument to the March Dead (1921) was dedicated to the memory of nine workers who died in Weimar resisting the Kapp Putsch.

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  Gropius with Harry Seidler in Sydney, Australia, in 1954

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  Modern reconstruction of Gropius's house in Dessau. It was destroyed during World War II. This reconstruction was not built as an exact replica of the original house

Sources

• Isaacs, Reginald (1991). Walter Gropius: An illustrated Biography of the Creator of the Bauhaus (First English-language ed.). Berlin: Bulfinch Press. ISBN 978-0-8212-1753-5.

Further reading

Library resources about Walter Gropius
Resources in your library Resources in other libraries
By Walter Gropius
Resources in your library Resources in other libraries

• The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, 1935.
• The Scope of Total Architecture, Walter Gropius, 1956.
• From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe, 1981.
• The Walter Gropius Archive, Routledge (publisher), 1990–1991.

Other websites

• Designer portrait on rosenthalusa.com
• More information on Gropius's early years at the Bauhaus can be found in his correspondence with Lily Hildebrandt, with whom he had an affair between 1919 and 1922: Hans and Lily Hildebrandt papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. CA.
• Bauhaus Reviewed 1919–33 audiobook liner notes at LTM
• Newspaper clippings about Walter Gropius in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW