Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and founder of Bauhaus.

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Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third son of a building advisor to the government with the same name, and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber (1855–1933) whose family owned a manor near Berlin.

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Gropius was an architect, like his father before him, and designed buildings which used modern materials like concrete on a steel-frame construction and glass brick and are often compared to abstract paintings. In 1919 he founded the Bauhaus, a school of design where students were taught to use modern and innovative materials and mass-produced fittings, often originally intended for industrial settings, to create original furniture and buildings.

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Gropius married Alma Schindler after the death of her husband Gustav Mahler, and they had a daughter, Manon, in 1916. When Manon died of polio at age seventeen, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her. Gropius' marriage to Alma did not last and Alma later married again, to Franz Werfel. Gropius and Alma are mentioned in Tom Lehrer's song "Alma".

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Gropius fled Germany in 1934 due to the rising power of the Nazi Party, and lived and worked in Britain, at the Isokon project, and then, from 1937 to the United States, where his own house, the Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, was influential in bringing International Modernism to the US. Gropius did not like 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." http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/gropiushouse/index.htm. Gropius and his Bauhaus prot?g? Marcel Breuer both came to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborate on the company-town Alumninum City Terrace project in Pennsylvania, before their professional split in 1941. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

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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 architectual firms in the world.

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Gropius died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts at age 86. He was known to have a snappy sense of style and was often seen wearing a bowtie.

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Among his students was the writer and theorist Siegfried Giedion.

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May 18: May 18 is the 138th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (139th in leap years). There are 227 days remaining....

1883: 1883 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar)....

July 5: July 5 is the 186th day of the year (187th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 179 days remaining....

Walter Gropius related Images and Photos (experimental)

Burogebaude - Walter Gropius Koln	Walter Gotell	Walter Payton	Walter Brennan
Walter Matthau	Walter Matthau	Walter Hottle Bottle	Walter Hottle Bottle
Walter Pidgeon - Big Red	Walter Richard Sickert Artist	Walter Richard Sickert Artist	Jessica Walter - Amy Prentiss