MANILA, Philippines - Who is this German architect who founded the Bauhaus School and is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture?
He was born in Berlin on May 18,1883. Like his father and his great-uncle before him, he became an architect. He could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters throughout his career. In school he hired an assistant to complete his homework for him. In 1908, he 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, he 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 in Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe last factory. Although he and Meyer only designed the facade, the glass curtain walls of this building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflects function and his 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.
In 1913, he 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.
He was appointed master Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weima in 1919. It was this academy which he 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.
In 1923, he 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 Bauhaus. He also designed large-scale housing projects in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Dessau in 1926-32 that were major contributions to the New Objectivity movement, including a contribution to the Siemensstadt project in Berlin.
With the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, he was able to leave Nazi Germany in 1934. In 1937, moved on to the US. The house he built for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts was influential in bringing International Modernism to the US.
In 1945, he founded The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC) based in Cambridge with a group of younger architects. TAC would become one of the most well-known and respected architectural firms in the world.
He died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 86. Today, he is remembered not only for his various buildings but also forthe district of Gropiusstadt in Berlin.
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