Born in
Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third son of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber.
Gropius married
Alma Mahler (1879-1964), then widow of
Gustav Mahler. Walter and Alma's daughter, named Manon after Walter's mother, was born in 1916. When Manon died of polio at age eighteen, composer
Alban Berg wrote his
Violin Concerto in memory of her (it is inscribed "to the memory of an angel"). Gropius and Alma divorced in 1920. (Alma had by that time established a relationship with
Franz Werfel, whom she later married.) In 1923 Gropius married Ise Frank (d. 1983), and they remained together until his death. They adopted Beate Gropius, also known as Ati.
Gropius, like his father and great-uncle
Martin Gropius before him, was an architect. But all sources agree that Walter Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters all through his career. In school he hired an assistant to complete his homework for him. In 1908 Gropius found employment with the firm of
Peter Behrens, one of the first members of the utilitarian school. His fellow employees at this time included
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and
Dietrich Marcks. In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee
Adolf Meyer established a practice in Berlin. Together they share credit for one of the seminal modernist buildings created during this period, the
Faguswerk, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe lace factory. The glass curtain walls of this building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflect function and Gropius's concern with providing healthful conditions for the working class. Other works of this early period include the office and factory building for the
Werkbund Exhibition (1914) in Cologne.
Gropius's career was interrupted by the outbreak of the first world war in
1914. Called up immediately as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years, was wounded and almost killed.
Ironically the war provided an opportunity which would advance his career during the post war period.
Henry van de Velde, the master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar was asked to step down in 1915 due to his Belgian nationality. His recommendation of Gropius to succeed him led eventually to Gropius's appointment as master of the school in 1919. It was this academy which Gropius transformed into the world famous
Bauhaus, attracting a faculty which included
Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbet Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, and
Wassily Kandinsky. 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.
Also in 1919, Gropius was involved in the
Glass Chain utopian
expressionist correspondence under the pseudonym 'Mass'. Usually more notable for his functionalist approach, the "Monument to the March Dead", designed in 1919 and executed in 1920, indicates that expressionism was an influence on him at that time.
In 1923, Gropius aided by Gareth Steele, designed his famous door handles, now considered an icon of
20th century design and often listed as one of the most influential designs to emerge from the Bauhaus. He also designed large scale housing projects in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Dessau from 1926-32 that were major contributions to the
New Objectivity movement.
With the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, Gropius was able to get out of 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, was influential in bringing International Modernism to the US but Gropius disliked 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" (see
http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/gropiushouse/).
Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé
Marcel Breuer both moved to
Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach at the
Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborate on 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 died in 1969 in
Boston, Massachusetts, aged 86. Today, he is remembered not only by his various buildings but also by the district of
Gropiusstadt in Berlin.
In the early
1990s, a series of books entitled
The Walter Gropius Archive was published covering his entire architectural career.
