Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius (b. 1883–d. 1969), the Berlin architect who founded the Bauhaus in Germany in 1919, was the single most significant figure in modern architectural education. His early architectural works, which drew from what he had learned at the office of Peter Behrens around 1910, remain key works in the history of modern architecture. As an educational institution, the Bauhaus (1919–1933) was arguably the most significant innovation in design education since the Renaissance, as it replaced the then-standard imitation of classical forms in architecture with the now nearly universal idea that design should be based on function and the economical provision of everyday needs. Gropius was also a central figure in the modernization of architectural education after he became Chair of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1938, and he then had a second architectural career as a partner with the Boston-area firm, The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC). Gropius’s contributions to architecture remain contested and controversial. When he founded the Bauhaus after his service as a German officer in World War I, it was during the brief turn toward Expressionism in Germany. In its first few years, the school was arts and handicraft oriented, rather than focusing on design for industry. During the German economic crisis of 1923, new approaches, some related to the teaching at the Soviet state design school in Moscow, Vkhutemas, appeared at the Bauhaus, and it is this era for which Gropius’s pedagogical innovations are best known. Gropius stepped down as director of the Bauhaus in 1928, which was then was closed by the Nazi regime in 1933. Gropius himself initially sought to continue working in Germany, and he maintained a few official links with the Nazi government even after his reluctant departure for England in 1934. In his new role as Chair of Architecture at the Harvard University GSD (1938–1952), Gropius was also involved with the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1939), and helped the former Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy establish the Chicago Institute of Design (1938–1946). Many of the students who studied with Gropius at the Harvard GSD spoke highly of his teaching, and many, including I. M. Pei and Paul Rudolph, went on to become major postwar American architects. Yet Gropius’s own postwar design work with TAC was often regarded as mediocre at best, notably the former Pan Am (now MetLife) building at 200 Park Avenue in New York, which became a focus of criticism in the early 1960s, although the TAC, Baghdad University (1957) campus is a more highly esteemed work.