Date/place of birth:
18 May 1883
Berlin, Germany
Date/place of death:
5 July 1969
Cambridge, Massachusetts
C
Relationship to the
college:
Visitor
Advisory Council
April 1940-Spring 1949
Architectural designs, 1939
Guest Faculty
1944, 1945, 1946 Summer Art Institutes
Profession:
Architect
Educator
INTERNAL LINKS
Gropius-Breuer Plans
Black Mountain College Newsletter, 4, March1939 |
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 Walter Gropius, educator, architect and founder of the Bauhaus, fled
Germany for England where he worked with Maxwell Fry and the Isokon Group
in London. In 1937, he accepted an invitation to teach architecture at the
Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. From 1938-52 he was
Chairman of the Department of Architecture.
Gropius first visited Black Mountain in December 1937. His former Bauhaus
colleagues Josef and Anni Albers and Xanti Schawinksy were teaching there,
and the visit was an occasion both for a visit with friends and for an
informal discussion of plans for the development of the Lake Eden property
which the college had purchased in June 1937. Gropius and his wife Ise
Frank Gropius, along with their daugher Beate "Ati", had arrived in the United States the previous May.
In January 1939, Gropius and Marcel Breuer, with whom he had formed a
partnership, were commissioned by the college to design a complex of
buildings for the Lake Eden campus. Had these buildings been constructed,
they would have been the architects’ first major architectural project in
the United States, and their influence undoubtedly would have been equal to
that of the Bauhaus buildings at Dessau. (Gropius-Breuer
designs)
A publicity and fundraising campaign for the buildings was launched with a
meeting at the Museum of Modern Art in January 1940 and with a second meeting in June. For a number of reasons – the necessity of a move to
Lake Eden in June 1941, the impending entry of the United States in the
European conflict, and failure to raise the initial $75,000 to construct
the first building – the buildings were never constructed.
From 1939 until 1949, when Josef and Anni Albers left the college, Gropius
had a close relationship with Black Mountain. He was a member of the
Advisory Council from April 1940 until the spring of 1949 and visited the college for
meetings. He also was guest lecturer at the 1944, 1945 qnd 1946 Summer Art
Institutes. After the war the college turned to the newly-formed
Architects Collaborative, of which Gropius was a member, for plans for a
women’s dorm. In May 1946 his house was one of three opened for a benefit
for the college. His daughter Beate ‘Ati’ Gropius (Johansen) attended the
college from the summer of 1943 through the summer of 1946.
At Harvard Gropius encountered an entrenched beaux-arts tradition, and the
transition to a modern curriculum was a slow process. He invited Josef
Albers to teach seminars and for a full semester, but he was never able to
obtain a tenured professorship for him. On the other hand, Albers, when he
observed the struggles Gropius encountered in effecting change at Harvard,
was not eager to leave Black Mountain where there was no established
tradition. Gropius encouraged his Harvard students to study with Albers at
Black Mountain and to attend the summer program for practical building
experience.
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