WALTER GROPIUS:

Biography:

 Walter Gropius (1883-1969) grew up in Germany.

 His father and an uncle were architects, and perhaps their interest rubbed off on young Walter.

 Gropius 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.

 He studied at technical universities in Berlin and Munich, and then joined the office of Peter
Behrens in Berlin.

 At the time, Behrens was one of the most well-known architects and industrial
designers (someone who designs objects to be manufactured through mass production) in Europe.

 He designed the Bauhaus School building, built between 1925 and 1926. It is one of his most
famous structures.

 Gropius's main concern was to create "modern" buildings for "modern man": meaning, a
functional type of building, without any old fashioned historical decoration with Romanesque,
Gothic, Renaissance or Neoclassical motifs.

 He therefore designed geometric-style buildings, devoid of all ornamentation, but with creative
elements inserted at key points in otherwise repetitive designs.

 The rise of Hitler in the 1930s drove Gropius out of Germany, he was invited to come to Harvard
University to head the Graduate School of Design just before World War II.

 In America, he continued both his academic and practicing career, in which he was a leading
architect for a full half century before his death in 1969.

 In 1959 he received the AIA Gold Medal.

Philosophy:

 Most assessments of Gropius’ influential career centre upon his achievements as educator and
author rather than as architect.
 In his own building designs he turned away from personal and subjective aspects in favour of
reaching for intellectual solutions of larger and socially urgent problems.
 Among his most important ideas was his belief that all design—whether of a chair, a building, or
a city—should be approached in essentially the same way: through a systematic study of the
particular needs and problems involved, taking into account modern construction materials and
techniques, without reference to previous forms or styles.
 His architecture does not have the aesthetic fascination of Wright’s or Le Corbusier’s but reflects
a sober and programmatic concern that marked his whole life.
 He followed international style i.e.,
  Simple geometry often rectangular
 Use of modern materials like glass & steel
 Smooth surface
 Primary colors
 Linear & horizontal elements
An important theorist & teacher, Gropius introduced a screen wall system that utilized that utilized a
structural steel frame to support the floors & which allowed the external glass walls to continue without
interruption.

His famous works:

 The Fagus Factory, Germany

 Bauhaus school, Germany
 The Gropius house, USA
 Harvard Graduate centre, USA
 Wayland high school, USA

The Fagus Factory:

  The Fagus Factory, a shoe factory is one of the earliest built works of modern architecture, and
the first project of Walter Gropius built in1911-1925.
 The commission provided Gropius with the opportunity to put his revolutionary ideas into
practice.
 The Fagus Factory is a complex with many buildings, which contain various functions such as
manufacturing, storage, and offices, and Gropius felt it was important to design an exterior design
aesthetic that could be applied to various structures.
 The use of brick — more specifically, a 40-centimeter high, dark brick base which projects 4-
centimeters from the facade — can be seen repeatedly throughout the complex.
 The most architecturally-significant aspect of Gropius’ contribution to the project is the office
building.
 Unlike the other buildings, this flat-roof, three-story building features a façade that is comprised
of more glass than brick.
 Instead of conventional load-bearing exterior walls, Gropius had made the bold and innovative
decision to place reinforced concrete columns inside the building to free the façade.
 A series of brick piers suspend iron frames between that supports glass inserts. Metal panels were
placed within the iron frame to conceal the floor slabs behind.
 The most innovative feature of the building is the fully glazed exterior corners, which are free of
structural elements.
 The exterior design of the office building effectively demonstrated Gropius’ ambition to improve
interior conditions while exposing contemporary construction techniques as an architectural
image.
The Fagus Factory was architecturally completed in 1911, though the interiors were not
completed until 1925. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011 for its early influence on the
development of modern architecture.
The Bauhaus school:
 Bauhaus, was a German art & architecture school founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919-
1925
 Gropius consistently separated the parts of the Bauhaus building according to their functions and
designed each differently. He thereby arranged the different wings asymmetrically.
 In order to appreciate the overall design of the complex, the observer must therefore move around
the whole building. There is no central viewpoint.
 The glazed, three-storey workshop wing, the block for the vocational school (also three storeys
high) with its unostentatious rows of windows, and the five-storey studio building with its
conspicuous, projecting balconies are the main elements of the complex.
 A two-storey bridge which housed, e.g., the administration department and, until 1928, Gropius’s
architectural practice, connects the workshop wing with the vocational school.
 A single-storey building with a hall, stage and refectory, the so-called Festive Area, connects the
workshop wing to the studio building.
 The latter originally featured 28 studio flats for students and junior masters, each measuring 20
m².
 The ingenious design of the portals between the foyer and the hall and a folding partition between
the stage and the refectory, along with the ceiling design and colour design, impart a grandiose
spatial coalescence to the sequence of foyer-hall-stage-refectory, shaping the so-called Festive
Area.
 The façade of the students’ dormitory is distinguished in the east by individual balconies and in
the south by long balconies that continue around the corner of the building.
 The entire complex is rendered and painted mainly in light tones, creating an attractive contrast to
the window frames, which are dark.
 For the interior, the junior master of the mural workshop, Hinnerk Scheper, designed a detailed
colour plan that, by differentiating between supporting and masking elements through the use of
colour, aimed to accentuate the construction of the building.