Word: gropius
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...Marcel Lajos Breuer wears 50 years of achievement as easily as one of his old tweed jackets. Indeed, he seems almost cherubic, a stocky, gentle man with a merry twinkle in his blue eyes. The more celebrated Walter Gropius was a teacher; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built crystalline monuments to a formula of his own devising. Unlike them, Breuer has touched and warmed contemporary American life by following a simple philosophy: "Architecture is a social art. It has an obligation to people...
...doctor's son in the university town of Pecs in southern Hungary. Knowing precisely what he wanted, he turned up at the age of 18 at the most stimulating and revolutionary design school the world has ever seen-the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, founded by Walter Gropius. The Bauhaus recognized the force of industrialism, the beauty of the machine, the potential of designing a new man-made environment by cross-pollinating the arts...
...PHOTOGRAPHS at the Fogg (sponsored by TAC, Mrs. Gropius and the International Exhibitions Fund in Washington, D.C.) illustrate Gropius's ideas of education and his conviction of the importance of the artist's vision for the whole of human concerns and endeavors. We can see in a plan for the "Megastructure" of 1928 the prophetic concept of day-care centers and housing for equal sexes. An entire floor is reserved for children's activities and day-care facilities, while the plan for living units shows what Mrs. Gropius calls "total change in the social order...visualized by Gropius, a change...
Prominantly illustrated in the exhibit is Gropius's concern with lower-income groups, his efforts to create pre-fabricated houses and furniture in order to keep budgets down--but not to sacrifice form. His work also extends to automobile, locomotive, and factory design; here, too, he reached to handle the problems of society. The photographs in the exhibit show exactly how he solved some of these architectural problems: the walls of all glass, often called glass-curtain walls (as in the Fagus Shoe-Last Factory, 1911), convey an airiness and transparency never before attributed to building structures; the modular furniture...
Unfortunately, we only get snatches of the buildings by looking at these photographs; we are not drawn into the life of the structures, but only given a historical catalogue. Yet, the imagery of his buildings stands on its own, the form handsomely following function; Gropius's devotion to the arts and conviction in the artistic vision has been an overriding yet unproclaimed force in liberal education. It was Gropius's idea that the artist would be at the core of a liberal system of education. He had hoped to make Harvard his proving ground; "It was," says Mrs. Gropius...