Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius (circa 1919). Photo by Louis Held
Born	Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (1883-05-18)May 18, 1883 Berlin, Germany
Died	July 5, 1969(1969-07-05) (aged 86) Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nationality	German/American
Work
Practice	Peter Behrens (1908–1910) The Architects' Collaborative (1945–1969)
Buildings	Fagus Factory Werkbund Exhibition (1914) Bauhaus Gropius House University of Baghdad J.F. Kennedy Federal Building Pan Am Building

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School^[1] who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.

Early life[link]

Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third child of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber. Gropius married Alma Mahler (1879–1964), widow of Gustav Mahler. Walter and Alma's daughter, named Manon after Walter's mother, was born in 1916. When Manon died of polio at age 18, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her (it is inscribed "to the memory of an angel"). Gropius and Alma divorced in 1920. (Alma had by that time established a relationship with Franz Werfel, whom she later married.) In 1923, Gropius married Ise (Ilse) Frank (d. 1983), and they remained together until his death. They adopted Beate Gropius, also known as Ati.

Early career (1908-1914)[link]

Walter Gropius, like his father and his great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, became an architect. Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters throughout his career. In school he hired an assistant to complete his homework for him. In 1908 Gropius found employment with the firm of Peter Behrens, one of the first members of the utilitarian school. His fellow employees at this time included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Dietrich Marcks.

In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee Adolf Meyer established a practice in Berlin. Together they share credit for one of the seminal modernist buildings created during this period: the Faguswerk in Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe last factory. Although Gropius and Meyer only designed the facade, the glass curtain walls of this building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflects function and Gropius's concern with providing healthful conditions for the working class. Other works of this early period include the office and factory building for the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) in Cologne.

In 1913, Gropius published an article about "The Development of Industrial Buildings," which included about a dozen photographs of factories and grain elevators in North America. A very influential text, this article had a strong influence on other European modernists, including Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn, both of whom reprinted Gropius's grain elevator pictures between 1920 and 1930.^[2]

Gropius's career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Called up immediately as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years, and was wounded and almost killed.^[3]

Bauhaus period (1919-1932)[link]

Bauhaus (built 1925–1926) in Dessau, Germany

Walter Gropius's Monument to the March Dead (1921)

Gropius's career advanced in the postwar period. Henry van de Velde, the master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar was asked to step down in 1915 due to his Belgian nationality. His recommendation for Gropius to succeed him led eventually to Gropius's appointment as master of the school in 1919. It was this academy which Gropius transformed into the world famous Bauhaus, attracting a faculty that included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky. One example was the armchair F 51, designed for the Bauhaus's directors room in 1920 - nowadays a re-edition in the market, manufactured by the German company TECTA/Lauenfoerde.

In 1919, Gropius was involved in the Glass Chain utopian expressionist correspondence under the pseudonym "Mass." Usually more notable for his functionalist approach, the "Monument to the March Dead," designed in 1919 and executed in 1920, indicates that expressionism was an influence on him at that time.

In 1923, Gropius designed his famous door handles, now considered an icon of 20th-century design and often listed as one of the most influential designs to emerge from Bauhaus. He also designed large-scale housing projects in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Dessau in 1926-32 that were major contributions to the New Objectivity movement, including a contribution to the Siemensstadt project in Berlin.

Post Bauhaus (1933-1945)[link]

Gropius House (1938) in Lincoln, Massachusetts

With the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, Gropius was able to leave Nazi Germany in 1934, on the pretext of making a temporary visit to Britain. He lived and worked in Britain, as part of the Isokon group with Fry and others and then, in 1937, moved on to the United States. The house he built for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, (now known as Gropius House) was influential in bringing International Modernism to the U.S. but Gropius disliked the term: "I made it a point to absorb into my own conception those features of the New England architectural tradition that I found still alive and adequate."^[4]

Gropius with Harry Seidler in Sydney, 1954

Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé Marcel Breuer both moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborate on projects including The Alan I W Frank House in Pittsburgh and the company-town Aluminum City Terrace project in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, before their professional split. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In 1945, Gropius founded The Architects' Collaborative (TAC) based in Cambridge with a group of younger architects. The original partners included Norman C. Fletcher, Jean B. Fletcher, John C. Harkness, Sarah P. Harkness, Robert S. MacMillan, Louis A. MacMillen, and Benjamin C. Thompson. TAC would become one of the most well-known and respected architectural firms in the world. TAC went bankrupt in 1995.

Death[link]

Gropius died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 86.

Legacy[link]

Today, Gropius is remembered not only by his various buildings but also by the district of Gropiusstadt in Berlin. In the early 1990s, a series of books entitled The Walter Gropius Archive was published covering his entire architectural career. The CD audiobook Bauhaus Reviewed 1919-33 includes a lengthy English Language interview with Gropius.

Selected buildings[link]

Aluminum City Terrace (1944)

• 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 Faculty, Housin, Dessau, Germany
• 1936 Village College, Impington, Cambridge, England
• 1936 66 Old Church Street, Chelsea, London, England
• 1937 The Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA
• 1942–1944 Aluminum City Terrace housing project, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, USA
• 1949–1950 Harvard Graduate Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (The Architects' Collaborative)^[5]
• 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.^{[citation needed]}
• 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, 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– 69 Tower East Shaker Heights, Ohio, this was Gropius' last major project.

The building in Niederkirchnerstraße, Berlin, known as the Gropius-Haus is named for Gropius' great-uncle, Martin Gropius, and is not associated with Bauhaus.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• 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.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Walter Gropius

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Walter Gropius

• 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 1919-22: Getty Research Institute, California.
• Bauhaus Reviewed 1919-33 audiobook liner notes at LTM

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Bruno Zevi (22 January 1918 Rome, Italy - 9 January 2000 Rome, Italy) was an Italian architect, historian, professor, curator, author and editor. Zevi was a vocal critic of 'classicising' modern architecture and postmodernism.

University years[link]

On finishing school in 1933, Zevi enrolled at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Rome. Due to the anti-Semitic laws, Zevi was forced in 1938 to abandon his studies, and so left for London, UK, before moving to the USA. Zevi graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, then under the directorship of Walter Gropius. In 1940 he married Italian journalist and writer Tullia Calabi^[1] While in the USA he discovered the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, which became one of the bases for his championing of organic architecture. Zevi returned to London in 1943, working as a translator in the war effort.

Association for Organic Architecture[link]

In 1944 he founded the Association for Organic Architecture (APAO). The following year the magazine Metron-architecture reviewed his book Towards an Organic Architecture, which brought him international acclaim.

A stairway in Rome named in his honor

University professor[link]

In 1945 Zevi became Professor of Architectural History at the University of Venice. Later, he was a Professor at the University of Rome, and a member of the International Academy of Architecture (IAA) in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Editor and writer[link]

From 1955 onwards he wrote a column for the weekly L'Espresso magazine. He was an active member of the Italian Jewish community, and took part in anti-fascist activities within the Justice and Liberty Action Party. From 1954 until his death in 2000 he was editor of his own magazine L'architettura. Cronache e storia.

The Modern Language of Architecture is one of Zevi’s most significant publications. In this book Zevi sets forth seven principles or “antirules” to codify the language of architecture created by Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Wright. In place of the classical language of the Beaux Art school, with its focus on abstract principles of order, proportion, and symmetry, he presents an alternative system of communication characterized by a free interpretation of contents and function, an emphasis on difference and dissonance, a dynamic of multidimensional vision, and independent interplay of elements, an organic marriage of engineering and design, a concept of living spaces that are designed for use, and an integration of buildings into their surroundings. Anticipating the innovations of postmodern architecture, Zevi argues forcefully for complexity and against unity, for decomposition dialogue between architecture and historiography, finding elements of the modern language of architecture throughout history, and discussing the process of architectural innovation.

Modern architecture movement[link]

Zevi participated in the influential International Architecture Symposium "Mensch und Raum" (Man and Space) at the Vienna University of Technology (Technische Universität Wien) in 1984, also attended by Justus Dahinden, Ernst Gisel, Jorge Glusberg, Otto Kapfinger, Frei Otto, Ionel Schein, Dennis Sharp, Paolo Soleri, and Pierre Vago.

Such was Zevi's uncompromising critique of any tendency in modern architecture towards classicism that he even would criticize those architects he otherwise admired: "When Gropius, Mies and Aalto produced [symmetrical buildings] it was an act of surrender. Lacking a modern code, they weakened and regressed to the familiar womb of classicism." (Zevi, The Modern Language of Architecture).

Quotes[link]

"In 1973, Zevi set out (his) ideas as a set of invariants - a sort of anti-classical codebook that attempted to define modernity as a language of asymmetry and dissonance, which he propagated via his magazine L'architettura, cronache e storia. This exciting theory of architecture as rupture and fragmentation marks him out as the seminal theoretician for all currents of modernism interested in iconoclasm and deconstruction, from Alvar Aalto in the 1930s to Daniel Libeskind in the 1990s." (Thomas Muirhead, March 1, 2000; The Guardian, Obituary, 2000)

Select list of publications by B. Zevi[link]

• Verso un’architettura organica, Einaudi, Torino 1945 (English translation, Towards an Organic Architecture, Faber & Faber, London 1950)
• Saper vedere l’architettura, Einaudi, Torino 1948 (English translation, Architecture as Space. How to look at Architecture, Horizon Press, New York 1957; Da Capo Press, New York 1993)
• Storia dell’architettura moderna, Einaudi, Torino 1950
• Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture, Horizon Press, New York 1957
• Michelangiolo architetto, edited with P. Portoghesi, Einaudi, Torino 1964
• Erich Mendelsohn Opera Completa, Etas Kompass, Milano 1970; Testo & Immagine, Torino 1997 (English translation, Erich Mendelsohn - The Complete Works, Birkhäuser Verlag, Berlin, 1999)

References[link]

R. Dulio, Introduzione a Bruno Zevi, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2008

External links[link]

• Bruno Zevi at the archINFORM database
• Foundation Bruno Zevi
• "Bruno Zevi" (The Guardian)
• ADAO - The International Web Portal of Organic Architecture