Seminar Report

Walter Gropius

INTRODUCTION

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and art educator who founded the Bauhaus school of design, which became a dominant force in modern architecture and the applied arts in the 20th century.

Walter Gropius believed that all design should be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. His Bauhaus school pioneered a functional, severely simple architectural style, featuring the elimination of surface decoration and extensive use of glass

Walter Gropius

EARLY CAREER (1908-1914)

Walter Gropius, like his father and his great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, became an architect.

 In 1908, after studying architecture in Munich and Berlin for four semesters, Gropius joined the office of the renowned architect and industrial designer Peter Behrens, who worked as a creative consultant for AEG, with co-workers including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. 

In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee Adolf Meyer established a practice in Berlin . He designed furniture, wallpapers, objects for mass production, automobile bodies and even a diesel locomotive.

In 1911, Gropius worked with Adolf Meyer on the design of the Fagus-Werk, a factory in the Lower Saxony town of Alfeld an der Leine. With its clear cubic form and transparent façade of steel and glass, this factory building is perceived to be a pioneering work of what later became known as modern architecture.

Fagus-Werk, in Lower Saxony (1911)

Walter Gropius

For the 1914 exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) in Cologne, Gropius and Adolf Meyer designed a prototype factory which was to become yet another classic example of modern architecture.

In 1913, Gropius published an article about "The Development of Industrial Buildings," which included about a dozen photographs of factories and grain elevators in North America. A very influential text, this article had a strong influence on other European modernists, including Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn, both of whom reprinted Gropius's grain elevator pictures between 1920 and 1930.

Gropius's career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Called up immediately as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years, and was wounded and almost killed.

Prototype factory in Cologne

(1914)

Walter Gropius

BAUHAUS PERIOD (1919-1932)

Gropius's career advanced in the post-war period.   Gropius became involved with several groups of radical artists that sprang up in Berlin in the winter of 1918.

In March 1919 Gropius was elected chairman of the Working Council for Art and a month later was appointed as master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar which Gropius transformed into the world famous Bauhaus, attracting a faculty that included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky.

Walter Gropius

The underlying idea of the Bauhaus, which was formulated by Walter Gropius, was to create a new unity of crafts, art and technology. The intention was to offer the right environment for the realisation of the total work of art.

According to Gropius’s curriculum, education at the Bauhaus began with the obligatory preliminary course, continued in the workshops and culminated in the building

The Bauhaus building provides an important landmark of architectural history, even though it was dependent on earlier projects of the architect...as well as on the basic outlines and concepts of Frank Lloyd Wright.

It consists of three connected wings or bridges... School and workshop are connected through a two-story bridge, which spans the approach road from Dessau. The administration was located on the lower level of the bridge, and on the upper level was the private office of the two architects, Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, which could be compared to the ship captain's 'command bridge' due to its location. The dormitories and the school building are connected through a wing where the assembly hall and the dining room are located, with a stage between.

Walter Gropius

The basic structure of the Bauhaus consists of a clear and carefully thought-out system of connecting wings, which correspond to the internal operating system of the school. The technical construction of the building... is demonstrated by the latest technological development of the time: a skeleton of reinforced concrete with brickwork, mushroom-shaped ceilings on the lower level, and roofs covered with asphalt tile that can be walked upon. The construction area consisted of 42,445 [cubic yards] (32,450 [cubic meters]) and the total cost amounted to 902,500 marks. Such an economical achievement was possible only due to the assistance of the Bauhaus teachers and students, which at the same time, of course, could be viewed as an ideal means of education.

Ground Floor Plan

Connecting Bridge Staff Housing

Walter Gropius

POST BAUHAUS (1933-1945)

With the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, Gropius was able to leave Nazi Germany in 1934, on the pretext of making a temporary visit to Britain. He lived and worked in Britain, as part of the Isokon group with Fry and others and then, in 1937, moved on to the United States. The house he built for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, (now known as Gropius House) was influential in bringing International Modernism to the U.S.

First Floor Plan Roof Plan

Interior of Gropius House

Walter Gropius

Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé Marcel Breuer both moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborate on projects including The Alan I W Frank House in Pittsburgh and the company-town Aluminum City Terrace project in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, before their professional split. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

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 architectural firms in the world. TAC went bankrupt in 1995

Gropius House in Lincoln

Walter Gropius

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Bauhaus.html

Walter Gropius

http://www.walter-gropius.com/ http://www.preservationbuffaloniagara.org/buildings-and-sites/

buildings-catalog/location:grain-elevators/ http://www.corbusier-furniture.com/walter_gropius_info.html http://bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/jahre/1919 http://architecture.about.com/od/greatarchitects/p/waltergropius.htm http://www.historicnewengland.org/historic-properties/homes/Gropius

%20House/gropius-house http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/fa267/gropius.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Gropius