Word: gropius
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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From the Bauhaus drawing boards, lean, well-proportioned buildings came forth to challenge the Gothic, Baroque and neoclassic structures of the day. One of the best examples of the austere new look was Gropius' design for the Bauhaus' second home in Dessau. Flat-topped and structurally spare, the building had horizontal bands of windows that made it seem to hover effortlessly above rather than rest heavily on the ground. Such buildings had no more of a distinct national style than a locomotive, a chair, a doorknob, or any other machine-made object...
...Make a Baby. Gropius always resisted being credited with any style. Architecture, he believed, had to be a collaborative process, with the architect as natural leader of a team including manufacturers of building materials, artists, scientists and sociologists. This was of course contrary to the old idea of the architect as solitary creator and was hard to accept. Frank Lloyd Wright, a noted individualist, once snapped: "Gropius, I suppose that if you were planning to have a baby, you would turn to a neighbor for collaboration." "I would," replied Gropius, "if my neighbor was a woman...
Though he was not Jewish, Gropius left Germany in disgust at the rise of the Nazis in 1934, worked in London for three years, then came to the U.S. In 1938, he accepted the post of chairman of Harvard's Department of Architecture, and the school quickly became the focus of young talent, including such now famous architects as Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph, Ulrich Franzen, John Johansen and I. M. Pei. Gropius insisted that their work meet society's needs and that they move ahead alongside industry-until then largely overlooked by architects as a partner in their...
...impact on architecture, practical success did not come for Walter Gropius until he was in his mid 70s. In 1945, he opened a Cambridge, Mass., office, called The Architects Collaborative, but his teaching left little time for commercial design. It was only after Gropius left Harvard in 1952 that the big, award-winning commissions started to come in: the U.S. embassy in Athens, the University of Baghdad, academic buildings for Phillips Academy at Andover, Harvard and Brandeis Universities. At his death, his firm had $315 million worth of work in progress, including a satellite city (named Gropiusstadt) outside Berlin...
...sense, though, Gropius lived to be disappointed. Rationality in architecture, which reached its peak with the highly disciplined, exquisitely refined towers of Mies van der Rohe in the 1950s, has been cheapened by the slick, boxy, formula buildings that proliferate in every city like frozen dinners in a supermarket. The architect's imagination is now captured by bold, brutal structures of raw concrete; or intricate multilevel structures, designed with the help of a computer; or "pop" buildings that seem to revel in the chaotic interplay of roof lines, angles, windows, colors. Yet all the architects who rebel against Gropius...