Walter Adolph Gropius

Born: 1883

Architect, Founder of the Bauhaus

Walter Adolph Gropius was born in Berlin. He trained professionally in Munich and Berlin before joining the office of architect Peter Behrens in 1907. In 1911 he became a member of an association called “Deutscher Werkbund” (German Association of Craftsmen), which was founded to ally creative designers with machine production.

From 1910 to 1925, Gropius designed some of his landmark modernist buildings including the Faguswerk shoe factory in Alfeld an der Leine in Lower Saxony and a model machinery hall for the 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne.

In April 1919 he became director of the three schools composing the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts, which was immediately turned into “Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar” (Public Bauhaus Weimar). With his practical sense of art, politics, and administration, Gropius succeeded in establishing a viable new approach to design education. The Bauhaus School moved to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed the school’s new buildings and faculty housing. The school itself is a key monument of modern architecture and Gropius' best-known building.

Gropius resigned as director of the Bauhaus in 1928 to return to practice privately as an architect in Berlin. In 1933, the Bauhaus was forced to close by the National Socialists. The “Bauhaus”-style would later, however, come to be considered the most influential factor in modern architecture.

In 1934, after Hitler’s rise to power, Gropius, and his second wife, secretly left Germany for London, and in 1937 moved to the United States, where Gropius was appointed professor of architecture at Harvard University. The home Gropius designed for himself in Lincoln, MA, became a museum and National Historic Landmark. Gropius became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944. He retired from Harvard in 1952 but continued to design. Among his later works was the Pan Am Building in New York City.

Gropius returned to Germany to design buildings for the recovering country in the decades after World War II, notably an apartment building in Berlin’s Hansaviertel (1957) and in the 1960s a massive development of apartments, communal space and even commercial space in Berlin. The project was completed after his death and named Gropiusstadt for him. Walter Gropius died in Boston in 1969.

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