Walter Gropius

(1883 - 1969)

Walter Gropius set up his Berlin architectural firm in 1910, when he was twenty-seven. In 1919, hired by the city of Weimar to reorganize the Grand Ducal Saxon institutions of art and design education, he began to develop the Bauhaus approach, which his biographer described as “Gropius’ attempt at a reversal” of the “horrifying carnage of the First World War in which technological advances had been harnessed to the weaponry of destruction.” He fled Germany in 1934 and ended up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he became a professor of architecture.