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

Natural within Berlin, Walter Gropius was a third boy of the building consultant to the government using the equivalent title, & Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber (1855–1933) whose family owned the manor touching Berlin.

Gropius was an designer, such as his father prior to him, & designed buildings which utilized modern materials prefer concrete in the steel-frame construction & glass brick & come typically in comparison abstract paintings. Inside 1919 he founded a Bauhaus, a school of project in which students were taught to apply modern & innovative materials & mass-produced fittings, typically originally arranged for industrial settings, to produce original piece of furniture & buildings.

Gropius married Alma Schindler after the demise of her hubby Gustav Mahler, and it got the girl, Manon, within 1916. After Manon died of polio at age seventeen, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her. Gropius' marriage to Alma did non previous & Alma late married once again, to Franz Werfel. Gropius & Alma come mentioned around Tom Lehrer's song "Alma".

Gropius fled Germany around 1934 due to the rising power of the Nazi Party, & lived and worked inside Britain, at the Isokon project, and then, from either 1937 to the United States, where his have home, a Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, was influential in bringing International Modernism to the US. Gropius did non such as a 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 & his Bauhaus protégé 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 around Pennsylvania, prior to their agent split inside 1941. Inside 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Around 1945, Gropius founded The Architects' Collaborative (TAC) based within Cambridge sustaining the class action of immature designer. A original partners involved Norman C. Fletcher, Jean B. Fletcher, John C. Harkness, Sarah P. Harkness, Robert S. MacMillan, Louis The. MacMillen & Benjamin C. Thompson. TAC would get one of a virtually all swell known & respected architectual business firm in the globe.

Gropius died around 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts at age 86. He was known to have the snappy feel of style & was typically seen wearing a bowtie.

Among his students was a writer & idealogue Siegfried Giedion.

Important buildings

a Fagus Works, 1910–1911, Alfred an der Leine, Germany a Bauhaus, 1919–1925, Dessau, Germany a Gropius Home, 1937, Lincoln, Massachusetts a Harvard Graduate Center (1949–1950), Cambridge, Massachusetts (Architects Collaborative) [http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Harvard_Graduate_Center.html] a University of Baghdad (1957–1960) a John F. Kennedy Federal Building (1963–1966) a Attleboro Junior High School (1948) a Pan Am Building (now a Metlife Building), (1958–1963), New York, New York, with Pietro Belluschi and project designer Emery Roth & Sons a Interbau Apartment bars (1957), Hansaviertel Berlin, Germany, with TAC & Wils Ebert a award-winning Wayland High School (1961)

Walter Gropius publications
A Newly Architecture & a Bauhaus, 1955 A Scope of Amount Architecture, 1956