Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius (1883-1969) was a German-born architect and teacher who founded the Bauhaus, a school of art, design and architecture, in Weimar in 1919. Born in Berlin, he studied architecture in Munich and Berlin without finishing a degree and worked in the office of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1910.

With Adolf Meyer he designed the Fagus Factory in Alfeld, Germany (1911-1913), a shoe-last factory whose glass walls hang in front of the structural columns and wrap around the corners with no column at the corner. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, he designed its new building (1925-1926), with separate wings for workshops, classrooms and student studios, and a glass curtain wall (an outer wall of glass that carries no floor loads) on the workshop wing. He gave up the directorship in 1928.

He left Nazi Germany for England in 1934 and moved to the United States in 1937. As chair of Harvard's architecture department from 1938 to 1952, he taught students including I. M. Pei and Philip Johnson. He built his own house in Lincoln, Massachusetts (1938), founded The Architects Collaborative in 1945, and worked with Pietro Belluschi on the Pan Am Building in New York (1963).