Harvard years of Walter Gropius

Unsympathetic to the Nazi regime, he and his second wife, Ise Frank, whom he had married in 1923, left Germany secretly via Italy for exile in England in 1934. Hitler’s government closed the Bauhaus in 1933. Gropius’ brief time in England was marked by collaboration with the architect Maxwell Fry that resulted in their important work, Village College at Impington, Cambridgeshire (1936).

In February 1937 Gropius arrived in Cambridge, Mass., to become professor of architecture at Harvard University. The following year he was made chairman of the department, a post he held until his retirement in 1952. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944. At Harvard he introduced the Bauhaus philosophy of design into the curriculum, although he was unable to implement workshop training. He was also unsuccessful in abolishing the history of architecture as a course. His crusade for modern design, however, was immediately popular among the students. His innovations at Harvard soon provoked similar educational reform in other architectural schools in the United States and marked the beginning of the end of a historically imitative architecture in that country.

In addition to his teaching, Gropius collaborated with Marcel Breuer, a former Bauhaus pupil and later fellow teacher, from 1937 until 1940. Among their designs was Gropius’ own house in Lincoln, Mass., which, with its use of white-painted wood and fieldstone, restated New England traditionalism in modern terms. This house and others designed by them were controversial, but the architects lived to see acceptance of their ideas. In 1942 Gropius renewed his interest in the production of architecture by industry when he became the vice president of General Panel Corporation, a company that made prefabricated housing. He retired in 1952.

In 1946, with six of his former Harvard pupils as partners, Gropius formed The Architects Collaborative (TAC), based in Cambridge. Among its varied American and international commissions, TAC received one to do the Harvard University Graduate Center (1949–50), a grouping of dormitory buildings and dining commons. The design is reminiscent of but less forceful than the Dessau Bauhaus buildings. Other TAC designs include the United States Embassy in Athens (1960) and the University of Baghdad (design accepted 1960, still under construction). Gropius remained an active member of TAC until he died at the age of 86. In accord with his request made in 1933 that his funeral not be a mournful affair but marked in a festive manner, 70 friends in Cambridge drank champagne in his memory two days after his death.

Legacy

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. Yet always, in conversation and criticism, he reminded his pupils of the vitality of the individual spirit, of the spontaneity of life itself. His habit of wearing a beret with a business suit was perhaps symbolic of the two worlds he hoped to bridge, “the gap between the rigid mentality of the businessman and technologist and the imagination of the creative artist.”