walter gropius - bauhaus

“We want to create the purely organic building, boldly emanating its inner laws, free of untruths or ornamentation.” (Walter Gropius)

- from berlin, upper middle class
- was an architect - great uncle was a successful architect
- In 1908, after studying architecture in Munich and Berlin for four semesters
-Gropius became a member of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) as early as 1910
-The same year, Gropius opened his own company. He designed furniture, wallpapers, objects for mass production, automobile bodies and even a diesel locomotive
-Gropius served on the Western front in WW I and experienced this war as a catastrophe.
-From 1919, Gropius was the head of the Work Council for Art, a radical group of architects, painters and sculptors. In addition, he contributed to the Gläserne Kette (crystal chain), a chain letter initiated by Bruno Taut that called for the "dissolution of the previous foundations" of architecture and the "disappearance of the personality" of the artist.
 -founder of the Bauhaus in weimar. Gropius was able to translate various ideas from the radical artists’ associations into reality
 - aimed to make art a social concern during post war upheaval
- educational aspect was its dual approach to training in the workshops, which were codirected by a craftsman (master of works) and an artist (master of form).
- The outcome of this approach was not established from the start but was to be discovered in the spirit of research and experimentation, which Gropius called “fundamental research” that was applied to all the disciplines and their products,
- Gropius left very few traces as an architect and artist. In 1922, his controversial design for the monument Denkmal der Märzgefallenen was unveiled at Weimar’s main cemetery. Destroyed by the NSDAP, it was rebuilt after WW II
-In 1928, Walter Gropius – unnerved by the quarrels in local politics about the Bauhaus – handed the post of director over to the Swiss architect and urbanist Hannes Meyer, whom Gropius had brought to the Bauhaus the previous year as the head of the newly founded architecture class and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. was also architect.
- In 1946, Gropius founded the young architects’ association The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a manifestation of his life-long belief in the significance of teamwork, which he had already successfully introduced at the Bauhaus.in England
 Gropius was emphatically committed to the recognition and dissemination of the Bauhaus idea