About Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He was a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar and taught there for several years, becoming known as a leading proponent of the International Style. Gropius emigrated from Germany to England in 1934 and from England to the United States in 1937, where he spent much of the rest of his life teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In the United States he worked on several projects with Marcel Breuer and with the firm The Architects Collaborative, of which he was a founding partner. In 1959, he won the AIA Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in architecture. In 1908, after studying architecture in Munich and Berlin for four semesters, Gropius joined the office of the architect and industrial designer Peter Behrens, one of the first members of the utilitarian school. Gropius was awarded the Iron Cross twice ("when it still meant something," he confided to his friend Chester Nagel) after fighting for four years. Together they share credit for one of the pioneering modernist buildings created during this period: the Faguswerk in Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe last factory.
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