Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus and did more than anyone to establish the visual language of modern architecture and design. Born in Berlin in 1883 into a family of architects, he studied in Munich and Berlin, worked in Peter Behrens's office alongside Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, and set up on his own in 1910. The Fagus factory of 1911, designed with Adolf Meyer, used a glass curtain wall with the corners left unsupported by visible structure, which was startling for an industrial building and is generally counted among the first genuinely modern buildings. He served four years in the First World War as a cavalry officer, was decorated, and was nearly killed. In 1919 he merged two Weimar schools into the Staatliches Bauhaus. Its founding idea was to end the separation of fine art from craft: students took a preliminary course and then worked in workshops under both an artist and a master craftsman. The teaching staff he assembled included Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Albers and Breuer. The school moved to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed its building, and was closed under Nazi pressure in 1933. He left for England in 1934 and for Harvard in 1937, where he chaired the architecture department and taught a generation of American architects including Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei. He believed design should serve industrial production and mass housing, and worked on prefabrication and standardised components throughout his career. His daughter Manon died of polio at eighteen; her mother Alma Mahler had left him for Franz Werfel. He founded The Architects Collaborative in 1945 and died in 1969.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history