Walter Gropius was born into an upper middle-class family in Berlin, Germany in 1883. He trained as an architect and became the innovative director of Staatliches Bauhaus (1919–28) before relocating to Britain in 1934 amid the rise of Nazism. He settled at the Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, published on the Bauhaus and carried out several architectural commissions prior to relocating to the USA in 1938.
Pioneering modernist architect Walter Gropius was born into an upper middle-class family in Berlin, Germany in 1883. He studied architecture in Munich (1903–04) and Berlin (1905–07), then travelled around Europe before joining the architectural practice of Peter Behrens in 1907 and the Deutscher Werkbund [German Association of Craftsmen] in 1910. In 1911 he collaborated with Adolf Meyer on a pioneering modernist design for the Fagus-Werk factory in Alfeld an der Leine – celebrated for its clear cubic form and transparent steel and glass façade – and on the prototype factory for the 1914 Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Cologne. During the First World War he served in the army, receiving two Iron Crosses for bravery. In 1915 he married Alma Mahler (née Schindler), widow of composer Gustav Mahler; they divorced in 1919. In the same year Gropius became director of the three Grand Ducal Saxon Schools of Arts and Crafts united as Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar, for which he recruited prominent figures including Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky with the aim of 'reimagin[ing] the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts' with 'a craft-based curriculum … turn[ing] out artisans and designers capable of creating useful and beautiful objects' (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History). In 1925, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau; Gropius designed the now iconic school building and faculty housing, but in 1928 left for his private architectural practice in Berlin. Following the Nazis' rise to power, the Bauhaus closed in 1933, and employment opportunities for all 'Bauhäusler' narrowed. In 1934, after successfully attending the London opening of a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) exhibition dedicated to his work and delivering a lecture at the Design and Industries Association, Gropius decided to relocate to Britain.
In October 1934, he settled with his second wife Ise (née Ilse Frank) at Lawn Road Flats in Belsize Park, London, an experimental block of service flats (later known as the Isokon Building), commissioned by designer Jack Pritchard and his psychotherapist wife Molly, designed by Canadian modernist architect Wells Coates, which Gropius saw as 'as near as he could get to an English home from home' (Fiona MacCarthy, Tate Etc 2019). Coates and Pritchard (who had visited the Bauhaus in Dessau) co-owned Isokon, an architectural development company, and Pritchard became his main supporter, subsiding his first six months in Britain, and introducing him to Henry Morris, Chief Education Officer for Cambridgeshire, who commissioned Gropius' pioneering design for Impington Village College. Gropius' other finished British commissions included Wood House at Shipbourne in Kent and a house in Old Church Street, Chelsea; others remained unrealised, primarily due to a lack of funds. Nonetheless his reputation gradually grew, partly owing to Herbert Read's influential Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design (1934) and Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936). Gropius's own book, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, with a cover design by Moholy-Nagy (1935), summarised his major architectural projects to date.
Gropius's London circle included fellow Hampstead modernists Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore ('the best of the living English artists'), and Herbert Read. He also served on the Advisory Council of the London Gallery in Cork Street and was involved in the seminal publication Circle: International Survey of Constructivist Art (1937), initiated by Nicholson and Russian-born Constructivist Naum Gabo. In 1936 Gropius applied for residency in Britain but shortly afterwards accepted a professorship in Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. His farewell dinner at the Trocadero, Piccadilly on 9 March 1937 was attended by 200 distinguished guests. Despite this, his ideas and the broader Bauhaus aesthetic remained largely alien to a British Establishment inherently hostile to its aims: 'abstraction, theory, unashamed modernity and a very alien version of socialism' (Owen Hatherley, Dezeen, 18 January 2019). Gropius' biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, assigns British intransigence to the 'predominantly Francophile aesthetic … originally promoted by Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group… The general consensus of opinion in mid-1930s Britain was that the Bauhaus style was rather grim' (pp. 318-19).
In February 1937 Gropius arrived at Harvard, becoming Chairman of the Department in 1938 (a post he held until his retirement in 1952). He became a naturalised American citizen in 1944. He again collaborated with Breuer on projects including his own house at 68 Baker Bridge Road in Lincoln, Massachusetts (1937–40) and in 1946, in partnership with seven of his former Harvard pupils, co-founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC), whose commissions included a Harvard University Graduate Centre project (1949–50). In 1956, Gropius visited London for his RIBA presentation of the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture; further honours included the AIA Gold Medal (1959), the Royal Society of Arts' Albert Medal, and the Goethe Prize (both 1961). Gropius died in Boston, Massachusetts in 1969. In accordance with his wishes that his funeral be a 'fiesta à la Bauhaus', a 1,000-strong party was organised in his honour at the TAC offices in Cambridge on 20 May 1970.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Walter Gropius]
Publications related to [Walter Gropius] in the Ben Uri Library