Word: gropius
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...certainly not beyond the Busch-Reisinger Museum's resources to do this. In 1937, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, migrated to Cambridge. He headed Harvard's Graduate School of Design, brought associate Gyorgy Kepes to MIT, and inspired a Bauhaus focus at the Busch-Reisinger. His gift of half the exhibited graphics (the other half were given this year by Lyonel Feininger, a long-time Bauhaus faculty member and his wife) is a dazzling portion of the Busch's substantial Bauhaus collection. Beyond that, the museum could easily have borrowed around Cambridge, a last stronghold of the Bauhaus...
...seems almost as remote as William Morris' workshop or Verrocchio's studio. It has become part of the "golden legend" of modernism. Except for Josef Albers and Marcel Breuer, the chief Bauhaus teachers of art, design and architecture are dead: Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe. Even the ideal that hovered above Bauhaus practice -that social conduct could be purified and made better by all-embracing design systems-now seems to have been a heroic illusion, an ignis fatuus of avant-garde thought: no one really becomes less wicked or more rational by living...
...unresponsive to human needs. The architect as master planner, exerting in his structures a pressure, both functional and ethical, on the messy, changing lives of their inhabitants, now seems to some critics an elitist figure, and obsolete as well. And certainly much of classical modern architecture as descended from Gropius and Mies van der Rohe was conceived in a spirit of lofty indifference to social patterns...
Meantime Walter Gropius had moved to the U.S. to head Harvard University's design school. In 1937 he asked Breuer to teach and practice with him in Cambridge, Mass. He was adored by his students, fine architects including I.M. Pei, John Johansen, Paul Rudolph, Ulrich Franzen. "Gropius was the establishment figure, stern and rational," recalls Franzen. "Breuer was the artist. He opened our minds to everything." Adds Johansen: "He was always accessible. We had lots of parties at his place. But in class, he goaded us. 'Why not do it?' he asked in his Hungarian accent...
Honest and Earthy. Breuer himself was finding new solutions in the intimate, beautiful houses he was designing with Gropius around Boston. His inspiration, he told TIME Reporter Leah Gordon, was the simple American frame house. "I liked the fact that anyone could construct these houses simply by nailing boards together. They are earthy, honest and dignified, like Huckleberry Finn and Abraham Lincoln...