Adolf George Walter Gropius ( May 18, Berlin, Boston, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect (later American).
Life and work[Edit][]
Walter Gropius began his architecture training in 1903 in Munich and put this in Berlin. In 1907 he joined the architectural Office of Peter Behrens. Three years later he established himself as an independent architect and industrial designer. His first major assignment was the Fagusfabriek in Alfeld (1911), a very progressive construction work and the first factory whose walls were almost entirely of glass .
Gropius was from 1915 to 1920 married to Alma Schindler, the widow of composer Gustav Mahler, with whom he had had a relationship for Mahler's death. Their daughterManon (born 1916) died in 1935 to polio.
In early March 1919 he succeeded architect Bruno Taut as Chairman of the Arbeitsrat für Kunstin Berlin-based, a wide-oriented Association to promote the international collaboration between artists and with the aim of artists aware of their social role in the reconstruction of Europe after World War I by means of publications, conferences and exhibitions. This Board went in 1921 inglorious ending and her ideals were not picked up by the successful, in 1928, CIAM. [1]
In 1919 Gropius founded the Bauhaus on. this leading Academy for architecture and applied art stemmed from the Hochschule für Bildende Sächsiche Großherzoglich-Art and the Grossherzoglich-Sächsische Kunstgewerbeschulein Weimar. From 1925 the Bauhaus was located in Dessau. Until 1928 the Bauhaus remained under his leadership stand.Around this time, Gropius together with Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and j.j.p. Oud counted among the big four of the architecture.
The assumption of power by the nazi's in 1934 led to the departure of Gropius to the United Kingdom. Then he went to the United Statesin 1937 , where he became a professor at the Harvard University. He worked closely with the Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer who he knew from the Bauhausperiod and who also had fled from the Nazis.
With a number of younger architects in 1945 formed Gropius TAC (The Architect Collaborative ).