Word: gropius
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...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...
...disciplined design with which Walter Gropius refashioned architecture Laszlo Moholy-Nagy sought to extend to every visible element in the human environment. The two men had been kindred spirits ever since Gropius visited Moholy's first exhibition in Berlin in 1922, and invited the young Hungarian expatriate to join his staff at the newly formed Bauhaus. Moholy's acceptance sealed a friendship, rooted in a rare meeting of minds, that was to last until his death...
...Bauhaus that Moholy's career took its essential form. If Gropius was the founding father, Moholy was the radical activist who translated idea into experiment. His assignment was the metal workshop, but by no means did he confine himself to metals. Murals, photography, films, ballet and stage designs, light and color, typography and layout all commanded his attention. He experimented with plastics in a day when they were considered a poor substitute for genuine materials, painted on aluminum, created complicated "light-space modulators" (see color opposite) that anticipated the light and kinetic sculptures of the 1960s...
Died. Walter Gropius, 86, fountainhead of modern architecture...