Who Was Walter Gropius?

German architect Walter Gropius might be best-known as the fearless visionary who spearheaded the legendary Bauhaus School of art and design. Through the Bauhaus he was able to consolidate his utopian ideas around the completed unity of the arts into one whole Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). But he was also an endlessly prolific designer who envisioned some of the early to mid-20th century’s most iconic buildings, both in his native Europe, and later in the United States when he fled to escape Nazi persecution. We pay tribute to the great leader who spearheaded the Bauhaus style.

Looking back, Walter Gropius was without a doubt one of the finest architects of the entire 20th century. After studying architecture in Munich and Berlin, he found success relatively early in his career. One of his greatest early achievements was the Fagus Factory, a modernist masterpiece completed in 1910 that laid the foundations of Gropius’s Bauhaus style. The building’s emphasis on simplicity and functionality over superfluous decoration became a hallmark feature of his design work.

Other highlights of his architectural career in Germany include Sommerfeld House, 1921 and the Bauhaus building in Dessau. Later, after emigrating to the United States, Walter Gropius brought his distinctly Bauhaus design sensibility with him. In 1926, Gropius completed the design of his own home in the US, now known as Gropius House (Lincoln, Massachusetts). He also designed and oversaw the construction of Harvard Graduate Centre, completed in 1950. 

Walter Gropius Was Founder of the Bauhaus

He taught students to develop strong technical skills in a range of specialist workshops and encouraged a spirit of experimentation and collaboration. This liberal approach has inspired many art schools since, most notably Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the 1930s. In Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau, he created a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), where teaching and creative activities echoed the style and ethos of the building around them.

In the mid-1920s Gropius changed track, moving with the increasingly industrialized times by encouraging “art into industry.” He stressed the importance of function and affordability, pushing the Bauhaus closer towards the fields of design. Gropius stepped down as principal of the Bauhaus to set up his own private design practice in 1928, but successive principals who followed continued with this same attitude of functionality and practicality.

Many students produced high quality products that made their way into mass production and had a ripple-down impact on the nature of everyday household objects, proving just how far Gropius’s legacy had come.

Walter Gropius Was an American Pioneer

When Walter Gropius moved to the United States in the late 1920s, he took on a teaching post at Harvard University, where he became Chair of the Department of Architecture. Like many of his former Bauhaus colleagues, here he brought his modernist, Bauhaus design ideas to the forefront of his teaching, which went on to shape American mid-century modernism. In the US Walter Gropius also helped found The Architects’ Collaborative, an architectural practice which focused on teamwork and collaboration. Following the success of his teaching and design work, Gropius was elected to the National Academy of Design and was awarded the AIA Gold Medal for outstanding achievements in the field of architecture.