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Dokumen - Pub Walter Gropius Buildings and Projects 9783035617436 9783035617283
Dokumen - Pub Walter Gropius Buildings and Projects 9783035617436 9783035617283
Walter Gropius
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Table of Contents
9 Introduction
20 Metzler House
Dramburg/Pomerania, now Poland, 1905–06
22 Janikow Estate
near Dramburg/Pomerania, now Poland, 1906–09
24 Von Brockhausen Estate
Mittelfelde/Pomerania, now Poland, 1907–14
25 Von Arnim House
Falkenhagen/Pomerania, now Poland, 1910–11
26 Golzengut House
Dramburg/Pomerania, now Poland, 1910–11
27 Kleffel Starch Factory
near Dramburg/Pomerania, now Poland, 1911
28 Fagus Factory
Alfeld, Germany, 1911–15, 1921–25
34 Workers’ Dwellings for Bernburger Machine Factory
Alfeld, Germany, 1912–13
36 Grain Store and Housing
Märkisch Friedland/Pomerania, now Poland, 1913–14
38 “Eigene Scholle” Housing Estate
Wittenberge, Germany, 1913–14
40 Model Factory at the Werkbund Exhibition
Cologne, Germany, 1913–14
44 Monument to the March Dead
Weimar, Germany, 1920–22
46 Sommerfeld House
Berlin-Lichterfelde, Germany, 1920–22
48 Sommerfeld Row Houses
Berlin-Lichterfelde, Germany, 1920–22
50 Mendel House
Berlin-Wannsee, Germany, 1921
51 Stoeckle House
Berlin-Zehlendorf, Germany, 1921–22
52 Otte House
Berlin-Zehlendorf, Germany, 1921–22
54 Municipal Theatre in Jena
Jena, Germany, 1921–22
56 Kappe Storage Warehouse
Alfeld, Germany, 1922–24
58 Hanover Paper Factory
Alfeld, Germany, 1922–24
59 Tomb for Albert Mendel
Berlin-Weißensee, Germany, 1923
60 Director’s Office at the Bauhaus
Weimar, Germany, 1923
62 Auerbach House
Jena, Germany, 1924
65 Müller Factory
Kirchbrak, Germany, 1925–26
66 Bauhaus
Dessau, Germany, 1925–26
Table of contents
78 Masters’ Houses
Dessau, Germany, 1925–26
84 Gropius House
Dessau, Germany, 1925–26
86 Törten Housing Estate
Dessau, Germany, 1926–28
92 Weissenhofsiedlung Houses
Stuttgart, Germany, 1927
94 Municipal Employment Office
Dessau, Germany, 1927–29
100 Zuckerkandl House
Jena, Germany, 1927–29
101 AHAG Sommerfeld Exhibition
Berlin-Zehlendorf, Germany, 1928
102 Lewin House
Berlin-Zehlendorf, Germany, 1928–29
104 Dammerstock Housing Development
Karlsruhe, Germany, 1928–29
108 Am Lindenbaum Housing Development
Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1929–30
110 Siemensstadt Housing Development
Berlin-Siemensstadt, Germany, 1929–30
114 Copper-plate Houses
Finow and Potsdam, Germany, 1931–32
115 The Growing House
Berlin-Westend, Germany, 1932
116 Bahner House
Kleinmachnow, Germany, 1933
118 Maurer House
Berlin-Dahlem, Germany, 1933
119 Levy House
London, Great Britain, 1935–36
121 Mortimer Gall Electrical Centre
London, Great Britain, 1936
122 Denham Film Laboratories
Denham, Great Britain, 1936
124 Donaldson House
Shipbourne, Great Britain, 1936–37
125 Impington Village College
Impington, Great Britain, 1936–39
128 Gropius House
Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA, 1938
132 Hagerty House
Cohasset, Massachusetts, USA, 1938
134 Breuer House
Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA, 1938–39
136 Ford House
Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA, 1938–39
138 Frank House
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 1939–40
143 Chamberlain House
Wayland, Massachusetts, USA, 1940–41
6
144 Abele House
Framingham, Massachusetts, USA, 1940–41
145 Aluminum City Terrace
New Kensington, Pennsylvania, USA, 1941–42
149 Packaged House System
Burbank, California, USA, 1942–52
150 Factory for the Container Corporation of America
Greensboro, North Carolina, USA, 1944–46
151 Factory for Cartón de Colombia
Yumbo, Colombia, 1945–48
152 Howlett House
Belmont, Massachusetts, USA, 1945–48
153 Michael Reese Hospital
Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1945–59
154 Peter Thacher Junior High School
Attleboro, Massachusetts, USA, 1947–51
156 Harvard Graduate Center
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1948–50
160 Stichweh House
Hanover, Germany, 1951–53
162 Overholt Clinic
Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 1953–55
164 Hansaviertel Apartment Block
Berlin-Hansaviertel, Germany, 1955–57
168 US Embassy Athens
Athens, Greece, 1956–61
171 Oheb Shalom Synagogue
Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 1957–60
172 University of Baghdad
Baghdad, Iraq, 1957–83
175 Pan Am Building
New York, USA, 1958–63
178 Gropiusstadt
Berlin-Gropiusstadt, Germany, 1959–72
181 John F. Kennedy Federal Building
Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 1961–66
186 School and Kindergarten, Gropiusstadt
Berlin-Gropiusstadt, Germany, 1962–68
190 Tower East
Shaker Heights, Ohio, USA, 1964–68
192 Bauhaus Archive
Berlin-Tiergarten, Germany, 1964–79
195 Rosenthal Porcelain Factory
Selb, Germany, 1965–67
198 Huntington Galleries
Huntington, West Virginia, USA, 1967–70
200 Amberg Glass Factory
Amberg, Germany, 1967–70
204 Bibliography
206 Subject Index
207 Illustration Credits
208 About the Author
7
Introduction
Walter Gropius was born in Berlin in 1883. Of his father, who was also
an architect, he wrote: “He was a rather withdrawn and timid man with-
out sufficient self-reliance, so therefore he never penetrated to the first
rank. […] He designed and built some buildings only in the first part
of his career, before he became a municipal employee, [...] In thinking
about the tradition of our family and its moral temperature in compari-
son to the more conservative uncles, our parents came off well in their
liberal breadth and in their indestructible kindness and tolerance. […]
I feel that my liberal inheritance has given me a cosmopolitan attitude
and breadth of thinking.”2
“For years, I spent my evenings at Behrens’ and identified with all his
work,”5 Gropius explained. “His wide-ranging and profound interest in
the design of the entire environment, which encompassed not only
architecture, but also painting, theatre, industrial products, and typo
graphy, impressed me greatly. [...] I owe him much, particularly the
habit of thinking in principles.”6 Gropius later opened an office together
with Adolf Meyer, another of Behrens’ employees, but the partnership
between the two was not equal, despite their work being presented
as joint designs. Gropius would acquire the commissions, or received
them through family connections, and was able to pay Meyer. Their
early buildings and projects resembled in many respects the work of
Behrens, which at that time was in turn influenced by the architectural
language of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Gropius himself stressed that he
belonged “to a Prussian family of architects in which the tradition of
Schinkel […] was part of our heritage.”7
One of their first works was a commission for a shoe last factory with
which Gropius shot to fame almost overnight. Reyner Banham wrote
of the design of the Fagus factory in 1960: “There can be little doubt
that it owes this high esteem in part to Gropius’ personal relationship
to the historians of the Modern Movement, and also, in part, to the
9
Introduction
Gropius would later look back on his early work as “youthful sins”9
and had no interest in publishing them. In omitting such works, com-
plaisant architectural historians and indeed Gropius himself have con-
structed the impression of a straight path to the development of his
work. This book instead traces this development building by building,
including his changes in direction. Where photographs reveal discon-
tinuities to his work, this is due not to the selection but rather the fact
that the evolution of modern architecture has always been ambivalent
and inconsistent. As with other protagonists of the modern movement,
his process of development is more akin to a meandering path: a pro-
cess of searching.
While the private houses that Gropius built at the beginning of the
1920s had symmetrical facades and conventional roofs, the models
of the Bauhaus settlement were now pure abstract cubes with asym-
metrical compositional tendencies as expounded by the Dutch De Stijl
movement. A more monumental expression of this tendency can be
seen in their design for the Chicago Tribune Tower (Fig. 4). As with their
industrial constructions, and in contrast to the winners of the competi-
tion, Gropius and Meyer left the skeleton frame of the building unclad,
emphasising the building’s tectonic expression. Nevertheless, it was
not entirely free of decorative aspects: the asymmetrical placement
of the balconies follows no functional logic and is motivated purely by
artistic considerations.
In 1929, Gropius shared the socialist critique of private real estate, de-
claring at the CIAM Congress (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture
Moderne) in Frankfurt am Main that: “if the minimum dwelling is to be
realized at rent levels which the population can afford, the government
must therefore be requested to […] provide the building sites and re-
move them from the hands of speculators.”15 In this respect, he re-
garded Russia as a role model: “The most restrictive shackle remains
the immoral right to land as private property. Without liberating land from
this private enslavement, healthy, viable and economical urban devel-
opment for the common good can never emerge. The USSR is the
only state to have achieved this most important basic requirement with-
out restriction, thus paving the way for modern urban development.”16
Gropius saw the path to “modern urban development” in residential
high-rise building and lectured on its benefits, presenting diagrams and
calculations detailing the advantages for the illumination and v entilation
of dwellings. He proposed minimising the size of dwellings and in turn
providing extensive communal facilities, which he presented in exhi-
bitions as installations together with furnished show apartments in or-
der to publicise the project. As the prospect of state subsidies all but
vanished with the global economic crisis, Gropius adjusted the project
to attract private investors, proposing a chain of high-rise slabs along
Before Gropius emigrated first to England in 1934 and then to the USA
to take up a chair at Harvard University, he took part in a last compe-
tition for a “House of Labour” (Fig. 10) celebrating the German work
ethic. His design for the building complex in the middle of B erlin’s Tier-
garten continued the architectural and urban planning principles of the
Weimar Republic era, this time however with a monumental parad-
ing ground lined with swastika flags. Lamenting the changes afoot in
Germany, he wrote in 1934 to the President of the Reich Committee
for the Fine Arts: “Is it now really true that this strong, new architec-
tural movement of German origin shall be lost for Germany?”19 And:
“You demand the German man. I feel very German in my ideas and the
ideas of my spiritual brothers of German origin – and who can make
himself a judge over what is German and what is not?”20 Almost three
years later he wrote to him again, now from exile, that his mission was
still to “serve German culture”, after all “I decisively opposed [...] the
fact that a newspaper tried to associate my name with a critique of
German conditions.”21
All the colour photographs in this book were taken by the author over
the last ten years, and the floor plans have also been completely drawn
by the author at a scale of 1:300 and 1:500, and in the case of the
site plans at 1:4000.28 Most of the black-and-white photographs are
from the collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin. This book focuses
predominantly on buildings, with only selected notable examples of
exhibition designs and interiors. Furniture and product designs are not
included. Gropius’ conception of the total scope of architecture and
design meant that he also designed door handles and crockery, as
well as railway carriages and cars, which were realised as prototypes.
“To realise the goal of a ‘total’ architecture that encompasses the en-
tire visual environment, from the simplest household appliance to the
complexities of the city, constant experimentation and searching is re-
quired,”30 explained Walter Gropius while relating the idea of the Bau-
haus. Mies on the other hand argued: “We do not like the word ‘design’.
It means everything and nothing. Many believe they can do everything,
from designing a comb to planning a railway station – the result is that
nothing is good. We are only interested in building.”31 Even though
Mies later managed the Bauhaus himself, his claim to design was less
comprehensive than that of Gropius. Mies described Walter Gropius
as “one of the greatest architects of our age,” and “simultaneously […]
the greatest educator in our field. […] The influence the Bauhaus had
in the world was due to the fact that it was an idea. Such a resonance
one cannot obtain with organization alone nor with propaganda. Only
an idea has the forcefulness to spread to such an extent.”32
1 “Landhaus” was the term Gropius wrote on the floor plans shown in Małgorzata
Omilanowska, “Das Frühwerk von Walter Gropius in Hinterpommern” (Walter Gropius’
early works in Farther Pomerania), in: Birte Pusback (Ed.), Landgüter in den Regionen
des gemeinsamen Kulturerbes von Deutschen und Polen, Warsaw 2007, p. 151.
2 Ibid., p. 131. In earlier publications, it was erroneously called the Metzner Villa.
3 Cited in Reginald R. Isaacs, Gropius: An Illustrated Biography of the Creator of the
Bauhaus, Boston 1991, p. 14.
The pair of brick houses for farm workers built a few years later were, by
contrast, much more rigorously classical in design. Built in 1908 after
Gropius had begun working in Peter Behrens’ atelier, they had clear
symmetrical forms and systematic floor plans of near-industrial sim-
plicity. The building elevations and plans are proportioned a ccording to
the Golden Section1 and the abstract, geometric form of the buildings
is underlined by the arrangement of the entrances to one side and the
rhythmic rows of uniform window openings. While Behrensfavoured
rows of an odd number of windows, the mirrored floor plan results here
in an even number of windows. A cornice and shared base emphasise
the buildings’ horizontality and the front face is divided by a horizontal
band, while the upper floor steps back at the rear of the building. As
Gropius published little of his early work, the house for the farm work-
ers, included by Sigfried Giedion in his biography of Gropius was long
thought to be his first work.
1 See Annemarie Jaeggi, Adolf Meyer – Der zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten
von Walter Gropius, Berlin 1994, pp 237, 238. While Jaeggi analyses the design for a
pair of houses for farm workers at Golzengut, the two projects are almost identical and
share the same organisational scheme. Jaeggi demonstrates that their design adheres
to the Golden Section. The plans shown here are reconstructions based on the plans
for Golzengut in Jaeggi’s book.
Gropius described the house for four families that he built on H einrich
Eugen von Brockhausen’s country estate in 1908 as “rather opulent”.1
Comprising four symmetrically equal parts, the north and south eleva-
tions of the building are identical. Like Gropius’ other buildings from this
period, the corner quoins are tapered while the entire building mass
and its projecting and recessed sections are covered by a single large
roof. As with the Metzler House and granary at Janikow, Gropius used
different window formats, but the mirrored arrangement of the building
gives the house a systematic appearance.
In addition to this house for farm workers, Gropius was also entrusted
with the reorganisation of the estate. He changed the entrance situ-
ation, adding large walls and a gateway. The now partially collapsed
and overgrown walls are capped with glazed green tiles. In 1913–14,
Gropius built further buildings for the estate of which all that remains
are photos of a greenhouse from Gropius’ own documents.2
1 Walter Gropius in a letter to his mother dated 15 February 1907, in: Reginald R. Isaacs,
Gropius: An Illustrated Biography of the Creator of the Bauhaus, Boston 1991, p. 17.
2 Annemarie Jaeggi has speculated on whether a still existing electricity transformer
building can be attributed to Gropius and Meyer. Annemarie Jaeggi, Adolf Meyer –
Der zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten von Walter Gropius, Berlin 1994, p. 268.
The manor house on Friedrich Wilhelm von Arnim’s country estate lies
about a hundred metres from the road. The driveway leads directly
up to the symmetrically-arranged house before dividing to lead from
the left and right up a slope to the front of the house. The house’s
slightly elevated position is underlined by the rough-hewn stone base
on which it stands, and an adjoining conservatory and entrance can-
opy are articulated as delicate iron and glass constructions. At the
rear of the house, a flight of stairs descends in a cascade into the
park-like garden. Gropius’ design bears similarities to the Schroeder
House that Peter Behrens had built previously in Hagen and which
Gropius had “detailed almost entirely on his own”1 while working in his
office. That project was, however, the subject of a dispute between
Gropius and Behrens who wanted no roof overhang, a decision that
did indeed prove to be a problem later. In his design for the von Arnim
House, Gropius therefore employed a mansard roof in an attempt
to improve on Behrens’ architecture, which he otherwise identified
with.2 Like Behrens, Gropius incorporated the drainpipe within the wall
and chose a linoleum flooring with an ornamental design by Behrens
for the conservatory. Like the ochre-rendered Schroeder House, the
entrance hall of the von Arnim House was plastered in red, giving it
a “Pompeian atmosphere”.3 The house has since been altered inside
and out and the glass conservatory no longer exists.
1 As Walter Gropius wrote in a letter to Georg Hoeltje on 5 June 1958, published in:
Helmut Weber, Walter Gropius und das Faguswerk, Munich 1961, p. 23.
2 Ibid. Gropius wrote: “For years, I spent my evenings at Behrens’ and identified with
all his work.”
3 Fritz Hoeber, Peter Behrens, Munich 1913, p. 89. Annemarie Jaeggi also notes that
the plaster of the entrance hall was red and the external render in a yellow tone. She
cites a note by Gropius that describes the details as having “a cream base / black-
brown bands / a little malachite green”. Annemarie Jaeggi, Adolf Meyer – Der zweite
Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten von Walter Gropius, Berlin 1994, p. 236.
Entrance facade
Garden facade
25 Conservatory
Golzengut House Dramburg/Pomerania, now Poland
1910–11, conversion, destroyed
1 See Annemarie Jaeggi, Adolf Meyer – Der zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten
von Walter Gropius, Berlin 1994, pp. 236–239.
2 Reginald R. Isaacs wrote that Gropius designed several such houses for the Golzen
gut estate. Reginald R. Isaacs, Gropius: an illustrated biography of the creator of the
Bauhaus, Boston 1991, p. 17.
The building was inserted into existing buildings on the country es-
tate.1 Partially rendered and partially left as exposed brickwork, the
building fitted in with the surrounding agricultural buildings. While the
base was articulated as a band of brickwork, the central section was
marked by a raised tower and projecting vertically-delineated central
risalit that gave the building a monumental appearance reminiscent of
many of Behrens’ industrial buildings. The device of concealing sev-
eral narrow windows in tall vertical slots that connect several storeys
was employed later by Gropius and Adolf Meyer, who had also worked
in Behrens’ atelier, for the factory facade at the Werkbund Exhibition
Building in Cologne. The projecting vertical wall section appears to
look like a c olossal pilaster bearing an architrave. The loadbearing
structure is a steel frame construction with Prussian vaulted ceilings.
The building, which was used to turn potatoes into starch flour, was
demolished in 2014.
1 The building is recorded in the list of works (Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius – Work
and Teamwork, New York 1954, p. 233) as dating from 1913–14 but a letter from the
client’s daughter, Hildegard Kleffel, from 24 October 1957 (Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Inv.
No. 6124/1) suggests the building was built some three years earlier.
While Gropius together with his collaborator Adolf Meyer were able
to make slight modifications to the floor plan, their primary architec-
tural innovation was the design of the main building with its glass
curtain wall and transparent glazed corners. As the facade was
not completely suspended from the supporting structure, it was
not strictly-speaking a curtain wall but it demonstrated an architec-
tural solution that was to influence the subsequent development of
a rchitecture as a whole. The loadbearing structure takes the form of
brick piers that slope slightly inwards. In contrast to Peter Behrens’
AEG Turbine Factory, which Gropius had also worked on, where
the skeleton frame is upright but the glazing slants slightly inwards,
the Fagus Factory did the opposite: the glazing was vertical while
the masonry surfaces were slightly inclined so that the piers grow
narrower towards the top, creating shadow lines.
1 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on the occasion of Gropius’ 70th birthday on 18 May
1953 in Chicago, cited in: Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius – Work and Teamwork,
New York 1954, p. 17.
2 Walter Gropius “Vor 50 Jahren” (50 years ago), in: Helmut Weber, Walter Gropius und
das Faguswerk, Munich 1961, p. 7.
3 Walter Gropius in a letter to Helmut Weber dated 10 May 1959, in: ibid., p. 60.
28 Staircase
The entire complex
29 Main building, view from the southwest
Fagus Factory
32 Storage building
Main building, detail Main building, south corner
Main entrance Southwest facade, detail
33 Main building, vestibule Stair detail
Workers’ Dwellings for Bernburger Machine Factory Alfeld, Germany
1912–13 (with Adolf Meyer)
1 Walter Gropius in a letter dated 13 November 1911, cited in: Annemarie Jaeggi, Ad-
olf Meyer – Der zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten von Walter Gropius, Berlin
1994, p. 266.
2 Walter Gropius in a letter dated 23 December 1918 to Karl Ernst Osthaus: “I have
not built any houses in recent years and those I built in the past are so appalling that
I cannot bear to look at them”, cited in Winfried Nerdinger, The Architect Walter Gro-
pius, Berlin 1985, p. 38.
Site plan
Semi-detached house type 1
34 Semi-detached house type 2
Upper floor plans
35 Ground floor plans
Grain Store and Housing Märkisch Friedland/Pomerania, now Poland
1913–14
The grain store with the inscription “Agricultural Trade Association” and
the building next to it enter into an architectural dialogue. While the cen-
tral section of the grain store steps back, that of the house protrudes
slightly forward. And while the rendered walls of the grain store are
delineated by brick coursing, the brick walls of the house are crowned
by a rendered band beneath the eaves. The horizontal delineation of
the grain store is similar to that of the Fagus Factory, aligning with the
tops and bottoms of the windows. In an early list of works, the project
is listed as “Grain Store and Houses”,1 suggesting that at least one fur-
ther house was planned that would most likely have stood opposite
the existing house creating a symmetrical layout: the houses and grain
store form an architectural ensemble. The different building masses
have similarly proportioned floor plans and both buildings feature ele-
ments – a central gable and two turret-like corners – that extend above
the walls out over the facades which are partially set back. The house
has since been demolished and the grain store has been altered so
significantly that only parts of it are still original.
1 See Annemarie Jaeggi, Adolf Meyer – Der zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten
von Walter Gropius, Berlin 1994, p. 281.
The housing estate for workers at the nearby factories comprises three
different house types.1 Along the southern edge of the site, a series
of identical semi-detached houses with adjoining outbuildings for live-
stock lines an avenue of lime trees. To the west, along a strip of chest-
nut woodland, and along the road bordering the site to the east, rows
of single-family houses are arranged in rhythmic L-shaped constellati-
ons that form small courtyards between them. To the north at the end
of the chestnut trees, a pair of semi-detached houses are flanked by
a pair of single-family houses. The housing types respond to both the
linear character of the avenue as well as the more dispersed struc-
ture of the chestnut trees. To the east, two slightly larger houses are
placed opposite one another to act as a gateway.
1 The houses were built by the “Landgesellschaft Eigene Scholle” for workers at the
Singer Factory and German Railways. While the semi-detached houses and large sin-
gle-family houses sold well, the most common smaller single-family house type was
obviously too expensive for its size and proved hard to sell. See Annemarie Jaeggi,
Adolf Meyer – Der zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten von Walter Gropius, Ber-
lin 1994, pp. 276–280.
Site plan
Large single-family house, floor plan
Single-family house, floor plan
38 Single-family house with outbuildings
Semi-detached house, upper floor plan
Semi-detached house, ground floor plan
Chestnut grove
39 Semi-detached house with outbuildings
Model Factory at the Werkbund Exhibition Cologne, Germany
1913–14 (with Adolf Meyer), destroyed
The rigorously symmetrical office building, taking cues from Frank Lloyd
Wright’s architecture, had a large roof terrace and was clad with light
yellow and very dark bricks. The ends and north-facing facade were
clad with glass curtain walling, its curved glass panes wrapping grace-
fully and membrane-like around the rounded staircases at each end.
While the front face of the building with its monumental entrance portal
and long access corridor on the upper floor was shielded by a mono-
lithic facade, the more private facade to the rear was entirely open, al-
lowing light to flood into the extremely tall office spaces. The experi-
ence of passing from the dark entrance areas with their painted walls
and ceilings and decorative reliefs and figurines3 to the light-filled “neu-
tral” space of the work areas behind was dramatic.
Like the machine hall, the iron structure of the Deutz Pavilion was en-
cased so that its open trusses looked like solid beams and columns,
heightening, in the manner of Peter Behrens, the physical presence
of the pavilion. The walls of the pavilion interior were faced with orna-
mental ceramic panels.
1 Walter Gropius in a letter to Karl Ernst Osthaus dated 15 July 1913, cited in: Annema-
rie Jaeggi, Adolf Meyer – Der zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten von Walter Gro-
pius, Berlin 1994, p. 270.
2 Ibid.
3 Including work by Gerhard Marcks who later became a Master at the Bauhaus.
1 Walter Gropius’ own description of the design from December 1920. See Klaus-
JürgenWinkler und Herman van Bergeijk, Das Märzgefallenen-Denkmal in Weimar,
Weimar 2004, p. 29.
2 Ibid.
3 Walter Gropius in a letter to Dietrich Clarenbach dated 1 August 1968, cited in:
Reginald R. Isaacs, Walter Gropius – Der Mensch und sein Werk, Berlin 1983, p. 465.
4 Walter Gropius in a letter to Dietrich Clarenbach dated 24 December 1968, cited in: ibid.
5 See footnote 1, p. 45.
Top view
44 Monument shortly after completion
Reconstructed monument
45 Memorial slab
Sommerfeld House Berlin-Lichterfelde, Germany
1920–22 (with Adolf Meyer), mostly destroyed
Gropius worked on the design for this house not just with Adolf Meyer
but also with many of the workshops at the Bauhaus. Josef Albers con-
tributed a coloured glazed window over the entrance, Marcel Breuer
furniture, Joost Schmidt wood engravings on the timberwork and Hin-
nerk Scheper the colours of the interior.1 Metalwork and textiles for the
house were also made in the Bauhaus workshops. “Architects, sculptors,
painters – we all must return to craftsmanship,” wrote Gropius in his pro-
gramme for the Bauhaus in 1919. “Let us strive for, conceive and create
the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture
and sculpture and painting.”2 The joint project was commissioned by
the Jewish building industrialist and timber merchant Adolf Sommerfeld.
The articulation of the row of four single-family houses built for the em-
ployees of Adolf Sommerfeld’s company with its side extensions and
recessed sections creates the impression of a single large house. The
mirroring of the floor plans, the emphasis given to the protruding cen-
tral section in which two house entrances are incorporated and the
single large roof that, like its four-dwelling predecessor in Mittelfelde,
covers all four houses, further heighten this impression. The building
was erected on the same site as the Sommerfeld House and here,
too, wood features prominently on its facades. The building rests on
a traditional rough-hewn stone base while the upper floor projects for-
ward like a traditional half-timbered house, the gable projecting even
further forward. Like historical half-timbered houses, the exposed ends
of the beams are also decoratively carved. Gropius drew inspiration
from historical examples, explaining: “The medieval timber frame hou-
ses in Germany and France, the wooden houses in Tyrol, Lithuania,
the Balkan countries, Russia and Scandinavia all bear testimony to the
endless possibilities of the decorative treatment of wood.”1
During the renovation of the building, many of the details were omit-
ted, such as the slight upswing of the eaves at the corners reminis-
cent of Chinese or Japanese temples. Further houses were originally
planned for the site, along with an administrative building that extended
over the roadway like a bridge.
1 Walter Gropius, “Neues Bauen” (New Building), in: Der Holzbau – Mitteilungen des
Deutschen Holzbau-Vereins, a supplement to the Deutsche Bauzeitung, 1920, Vol. 2,
p. 5.
The motif of the triangle also recurs in the design of the ceiling, the
stair balustrade and top of the window in the vestibule. Rows of bare
light bulbs on the ceiling accentuate the pointed sections of the ceil-
ing recess. Gropius seems to later have disassociated himself from
this E
xpressionist phase, omitting all the Berlin projects between 1920
and 1922 from his list of works.3 The client died shortly after the con-
version was completed and Gropius also designed his tomb at the
Jewish Cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee.
1 Annemarie Jaeggi, Adolf Meyer – Der Zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten von
Walter Gropius, Berlin 1994, pp. 404–405.
2 Ibid., p. 405.
3 See Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius – Work and Teamwork, New York 1954, p. 233.
Stair
50 Detail
Stoeckle House Berlin-Zehlendorf, Germany
1921–22 (with Adolf Meyer), destroyed
The building contractor Adolf Sommerfeld not only undertook the build-
ing’s construction but also provided the land through his property com-
pany.1 Like the row houses for Sommerfeld, built at the same time, the
timber cladding at the top of the gable switches to a diagonal pattern.
This Expressionist device is the only moment of extravagance in an
otherwise modest and solidly constructed house with a steep pitched
roof and window shutters that would be worthy of Heinrich Tessenow.2
The colour scheme for the interiors was designed and undertaken
by the wall-painting workshop at the Bauhaus and a carpet was also
made at the Bauhaus weaving workshop.3 At the rear facing the gar-
den was a terrace crowned by a centrally-arranged balcony that, like
Gropius and Meyer’s other single-family houses, emphasised the cen-
trality of the building. The house was badly damaged during the war
and in 1959 completely demolished.
1 Annemarie Jaeggi, Adolf Meyer – Der zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten von
Walter Gropius, Berlin 1994, pp. 144–146, 302–304.
2 Fred Forbát, who worked on the project at the time, wrote in a letter to Wolfgang Pehnt
dated 24 July 1969 that the house “could almost have been by Tessenow”. Wolfgang
Pehnt, “Gropius the Romantic”, in: The Art Bulletin, Sept. 1971, p. 383.
3 The design of the walls and colours was developed by Hinnerk Scheper. See
AnnemarieJaeggi, op. cit., p. 303.
The house is similar in type to the Sommerfeld House and its design
began just as the latter was nearing completion. In both cases, a two-
storey villa is fronted by a single-storey extension for the entrance that
replicates the form of the house in miniature. And in both cases, Josef
Albers designed a large coloured window above the entrance, lend-
ing the tall dark-coloured vestibule an almost sacred atmosphere. The
photo of the vestibule shows a lighter wall colouring added later b y
the owner who was evidently less partial to the room’s original mystical
atmosphere.1 While the tectonic timber block construction of the Som-
merfeld House reflects the early Bauhaus ideals of craftsmanship in
construction, the smooth, membrane-like render of the Otte House
already heralds the sober rationalism of the later Bauhaus. The rust-
red wooden window frames and roof form were traditional, with the
exception of the broken eaves line over the entrance. The floor plan
and the adjoining pergola that framed one side of the garden likewise
follow traditional patterns. After numerous alterations over the years,
the building has since been restored to its original condition. In place
of the destroyed glass window by Josef Albers is now a coloured
window by Gerhard Richter.
1 See Annemarie Jaeggi, Adolf Meyer – Der zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten
von Walter Gropius, Berlin 1994, p. 309. The wall-painting workshop at the Bauhaus
was likewise responsible for the colour scheme of the walls of this house.
The interiors were eventually painted in very strong colours. “The build-
ing’s only decoration is its colour,” wrote a reporter at the time, be-
fore proceeding to describe the auditorium: “A dark grey colour allows
the disproportionately large balcony to recede while bright salmon-
red emphasises the central area which is in turn demarcated by the
grey colour of the stage area. […] With exquisite taste, the colours of
the individual rooms have been carefully coordinated, establishing in-
timate connections, for example with the blue of the stage curtain.”2 A
second article describes the two lobbies as being blue, the foyer light
yellow, the cloakrooms violet, the staircase terracotta-coloured and
the curtain as deep blue.3 The geometric abstraction of the architec-
ture is mirrored by the cubic light fittings in the building and entrance
portal. In 1948, the building was once again completely altered eradi
cating Gropius’ design in the process.
1 Adolf Meyer in a letter to Fred Forbát dated 4 December 1921, cited in: Annemarie
Jaeggi, Adolf Meyer – Der zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten von Walter Gropius,
Berlin 1994, p. 305.
2 R. Seubert, “Theater der Stadt Jena”, in: Das Volk, 26 September 1922.
3 Oskar Rhode, “Das neue Theater der Stadt Jena,” (The New Theatre in Jena) Jenaische
Zeitung, 2 October 1922, cited in: Ulrich Müller, Walter Gropius – Das Jenaer Theater,
Cologne 2006.
Floor plan
54 Entrance
55 Auditorium
Kappe Storage Warehouse Alfeld, Germany
1922–24 (with Adolf Meyer)
The building was used to house and exhibit agricultural machines pro-
duced by the Brothers Kappe & Co. The factory in which the machines
were made, not far from the Fagus Factory, likewise had a loading bay
served by the railway line. The structure, its skeleton frame, beams,
ceilings and walls are made entirely of reinforced concrete. Initially, only
the iron profiles of the windows were painted red1 and the walls were
rendered later. Later still, the southern end of the building was also re-
designed. While Gropius described the design process as “straightfor-
ward” and “of no special significance”,2 Ernst Neufert, who was work-
ing for Gropius at the time explained that “this building was typical of
the way Adolf Meyer and Gropius worked together. Adolf Meyer came
almost every day with new ideas for the overall concept until Gropius
turned up and chose the one he thought most appropriate. But even
then, the project underwent constant revisions.”3
1 A note from the office written in 1923 states: “concrete, naturally grey/guttering, black/
window frames, minium red/doors, black (sheet metal)”. Annemarie Jaeggi, Adolf Meyer –
Der zweite Mann – Ein Architekt im Schatten von Walter Gropius, Berlin 1994, p. 314.
2 Walter Gropius in a letter to Helmut Weber dated 18 April 1960, cited in: ibid.
3 Ernst Neufert in a manuscript dated 12 May 1976, cited in: ibid., p. 314–315. His col-
league Fred Forbát likewise claimed to have worked on the project. See ibid., p. 313.
Floor plan
56 View from the northeast
West side
57 Facade detail
Hanover Paper Factory Alfeld, Germany
1922–24, conversion (with Adolf Meyer)
1 A few years later, without Gropius’ involvement, the building, which still serves as a
paper factory, was given an additional storey and the windows much reduced in size.
See Karin Wilhelm, Walter Gropius Industriearchitekt, Braunschweig, Wiesbaden 1983,
p. 107.
The tomb for Albert Mendel, whose house in Berlin Gropius had con-
verted just two years before, lies in the Jewish Cemetery in Berlin-
Weißensee.1 Made of travertine, its inscription and inlaid Star of David
on the sarcophagus are made of brass. The five-sided monolithic
travertine block of the stylised sarcophagus is part of an asymmetri-
cal overall composition. The stone frame of the rear panel continues
as a meandering ribbon along the ground. Unlike the classical tomb
that Mies van der Rohe designed for Laura Perls in the same ceme-
tery in 1919, Gropius’ tomb has a Constructivist formal language that
defines an architectonic space and also incorporates the Expression-
ist triangular motif so prominent in the interiors of Mendel’s house. The
realisation of the tomb was undertaken in conjunction with the stone
sculpture workshop at the Bauhaus.2
59 Tomb
Director’s Office at the Bauhaus Weimar, Germany
1923, reconstructed
For the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923, Gropius as its director pro-
posed a model office that would be designed and built by the different
Bauhaus workshops. Only later did the room in Henry van der Velde’s
school building become Gropius’ own office. The design embraced the
idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk and the unity of architecture and furniture.
“The Bauhaus strives to coordinate all creative effort, to achieve, in a
new architecture, the unification of all training in art and design. The
ultimate, if distant, goal of the Bauhaus is the collective work of art,”1
wrote Gropius, who also considered himself an artist.2
The design inscribed an imaginary cube measuring 5 × 5 × 5 metres
as a ‘room in room’ inside the rectangular space, marking its bound-
aries with an abstract suspended lighting fixture, a wall hanging and
a carpet. The room itself was divided according to the Golden Sec-
tion. The Constructivist lighting fixture shows the influence of the art-
ists’ group De Stijl.3 Quadratic and cubic were also the central table
and armchair. Adjoining the desk is a letter tray that lies directly in the
sightline between the seated person and the point of entry into the
room, inviting visitors to enter and move about the room. The desk
is framed by a dark meandering line that runs asymmetrically around
the table before rising behind the table to act as a holder for the glass
shelves of the letter tray.
When the Bauhaus relocated to Dessau, Gropius took the furniture
with him and incorporated them partially into his new office, which was
less expressive. In 1997, the director’s office was reconstructed. The
original desk is now in Gropius’ former house in Lincoln in the USA.
1 Walter Gropius, Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar, Munich, 1923,
p. 3. Published in English as “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus”, in: Her-
bert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius (Eds.), Bauhaus 1919–1928, New York,
1938, pp. 24–25.
2 See Reginald R. Isaacs, Walter Gropius – Der Mensch und sein Werk, Berlin 1983,
p. 249.
3 Gerrit Rietveld had originally developed this concept for a lighting fixture, which Gropius
had previously used in a modified form for the Otte House. The isometric drawing of the
room produced by Herbert Bayer is likewise influenced by the style of the De Stijl group.
60
61 Reconstructed director’s office
Auerbach House Jena, Germany
1924 (with Adolf Meyer)
1 The new owners of the house describe the building and its renovation in a book:
Barbara Happe and Martin S. Fischer, Haus Auerbach von Walter Gropius mit Adolf
Meyer, Tübingen 2003.
2 Little is known about the separation of the two architects. After the closure of the Bau-
haus in Weimar and its relocation to Dessau, Meyer decided to continue running an of-
fice under his own name in Weimar. Gropius had, it seemed, never offered him equal
partnership in the office.
Gropius’ first commission after moving with the Bauhaus from Weimar
to Dessau arose through a recommendation by Carl Benscheidt, the
owner of the Fagus Factory. It was for an extension to a wood product
factory for August Müller & Co.1 The production hall for manufactur-
ing wooden furniture parts was a reinforced concrete skeleton frame
construction with white-rendered masonry walls and blue painted win-
dow profiles. Next to the main section, its floor plan proportioned ac-
cording to the Golden Section, was an access tower with lift, stair-
case and sanitary facilities and a second lower single-storey building.
The fact that Ernst Neufert signed the plans for the planning permis-
sion indicates that Gropius had evidently entrusted him with a degree
of autonomy. The building has since been altered several times.
The design is objective in the sense that it fulfilled its practical purpose.
A building “can lay claim to beauty as long as it remains objective,”2
wrote Gropius at the time and employed smooth, even surfaces in
an attempt to strive for geometric clarity rather than tectonic expres-
sion. “The effect of the surface is so powerful because the subtle
subdivisions create no contrast between light and shadow.”3 Propor-
tions played a central role in this process of abstraction, and Gropius,
like Mies van der Rohe recognised its spiritual value: “Proportion is a
matter of the spiritual world: material and construction appears as its
bearers with the help of which it manifests the spirit of its master. It is
tied to the function of the structure, gives evidence of its substance
and gives it its suspense – spiritual life over and above the value of
its usefulness.”4
The design and manufacture of the furniture, the lighting and the
colours of the interior was undertaken in the Bauhaus workshops. Gro-
pius utilised many construction details previously used in his indus-
trial buildings. The exposed concrete construction bearing the section
Site plan
66 The entire complex with workshop wing and studio building
bridging the road bears similar detailing to his factory buildings from
that time. The supporting concrete beams, for example, widened to
meet the columns, forming diagonal brackets.2 In contrast to the factory
buildings, however, the concrete surfaces were subsequently worked.
The columns are also cruciform with indented edges and grow more
slender towards the ground. Although the architecture celebrates its
technical form, it is not entirely free of classical elements, such as the
monumental staircase and the articulated base of the building.
Despite having embraced the romantic call for a return to craftsman-
ship only a few years earlier, here he declared craftsmanship as ob-
solete. “Modern architecture hand in hand with technology has devel-
oped a characteristic face that is considerably different from that of the
old crafts-oriented building arts. Its typical traits are clear, well-propor-
tioned features.”3 The primary criteria for a “good floor plan” according
to Gropius were a clear separation of different functional areas and the
flexibility afforded by a skeleton frame construction.4
67
Bauhaus
Not far from the Bauhaus building, Gropius was able to build a series
of houses embedded in pine woodland for the Bauhaus masters. Three
pairs of houses were built for László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger,
Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee
along with a single house for the director which Gropius moved into.
The rent and running costs were above-average and the fact that hous-
ing had been provided only for the senior Bauhaus masters became
the cause of some discontent. The design and colour of the interiors
were developed together with the artists who moved into the houses
with their families.
“All six dwellings in the three double houses are the same but different
in the impression they make,” explained Gropius.1 The asymmetrical
composition of the interlocking volumes is a product of the mirroring
and 90-degree-rotation of the plan of one of the halves. Not only the
balconies and roof slabs cantilever outwards but also the upper sto-
reys, which, like Gropius’ earlier houses, are larger than the ground
floors.2 The central area of the house is the studio on the upper floor,
which is higher than the other rooms. On entering, the houses appear
small and fragmented: the number of doors create the impression of
being convoluted, in stark contrast to the expansive spaciousness of
the studios with their floor-to-ceiling glazing.
More than in any other of his works, Gropius draws here on the de-
sign concepts of De Stijl as proclaimed by Theo van Doesburg in his
16-point manifesto “Towards a Plastic Architecture” published in 1924.3
Mirror-image arrangements should be avoided, as should encapsu-
lating all functions in a single cubic form. The forward-facing planes
of protruding elements were painted in the primary colours red, yel-
low and blue.
The house for Moholy-Nagy at the eastern end was destroyed in 1945
and the remaining five houses were drastically altered over the years.
Since then, all the existing buildings have been restored to their original
state while the house for Moholy-Nagy and Gropius’ house next to it
have been reconstructed as abstract 1:1 ‘models’ by the a rchitects
Bruno Fioretti Marquez in 2010
Gropius planned the house for himself as director of the Bauhaus at the
eastern end of the row of Masters’ Houses. While the latter stand on an
open grassy site without any fencing, the garden of this house is sur-
rounded by a wall.1 Like the pairs of Masters’ Houses, the house is a
configuration of interlocking cubic forms. Although the upper floor does
not actually cantilever outwards, the dark, reflective cladding of the cor-
ner pillar creates the impression that it does. The use of a dark-coloured
base on some sections of the building further heightens the impres-
sion of floating elements. While the Masters’ Houses are only minimally
raised above the garden, the ground floor here lies significantly higher.
The ground level of the house is very clearly divided into separate func-
tional zones. The serving spaces – bathroom, WC, larder and kitchen –
face the road while the living and dining areas face south and the bed-
room west. As was customary for upper-middle-class villas at that time,
the house also contains rooms for a maid and janitor. The interiors were
partitioned by shelving elements which, like the tubular steel furniture
and wall colouring, were designed by Marcel Breuer2 with whom Gro-
pius would later enter into an office partnership. In the tradition of the
total work of art, the furniture and architecture were part of the same
composition: “The dissolution of the loadbearing walls into pillars made
it possible to use the wall depth for fitted cupboards.”3 While the living
room was given a more discreet colour, the curtains of the roof terrace
were orange.4 The living and dining area could also be separated off by
a curtain. Gropius strove here, as with the Masters’ Houses, to “make
1 Mies van der Rohe later inserted a kiosk, the “Trinkhalle” (refreshment stand), into
the wall.
2 Walter Gropius, Bauhausbauten Dessau, Munich 1930, p. 102.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 97.
5 Ibid., p. 134.
6 Ibid., p. 92.
Entrance facade
85 Garden elevation
Törten Housing Estate Dessau, Germany
1926–28
Gropius designed two houses for the German Werkbund’s housing ex-
hibition which Mies van der Rohe, as the organiser, described as “the
most interesting houses in the exhibition”.1 Like Mies, Gropius experi
mented with a steel skeleton frame construction. While House 16 to
the south was a masonry structure with traditional render, House 17,
which was set back further down from the road, was made of pre-cast
elements. Clad with Eternit panels and insulated with cork, this “experi
mental house”2 had much thinner walls than a conventional house. The
tubular steel furniture was designed by Marcel Breuer.
Although just a few years earlier Gropius had described his “large-scale
building kit” as an “additive system of connected cellular rooms”3 for
achieving maximum flexibility, these houses contained all functions in
a simple cubic volume from which one corner was subtracted to func-
tion as a roof terrace. The incorporation of different spaces into a single
block that Theo van Doesburg and De Stijl so vehemently opposed is
here the product of an efficient loadbearing structure whose 1.06-metre
grid was calculated to ensure that normed door sizes could be used.
The window profiles were made of metal. The lightweight construction
of House 17 can be seen in the exposed panelling inside and outside
and the placement of a window at the corner of the facade.
1 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in a speech held on 18 May 1953 in Chicago, in: Sigfried
Giedion, Walter Gropius – Work and Teamwork, New York 1954, p. 18.
2 Walter Gropius, “wege zur fabrikatorischen hausherstellung” (The path to industrialised
house building), in: Deutscher Werkbund (Ed.), Bau und Wohnung, Stuttgart 1927, p. 60.
3 Walter Gropius in a description of a “honeycomb architecture” on an exhibition panel
from 1923. See Winfried Nerdinger, The Architect Walter Gropius, Berlin 1985, p. 59.
94
View from the north
95 View from the south
Municipal Employment Office
South side
98 North side
Inner corridor
99 Central register area
Zuckerkandl House Jena, Germany
1927–29
“We want to create a clear, organic architecture, whose inner logic will
be radiant and naked, unencumbered by lying facades and trickeries;
we want […] an architecture whose function is clearly recognizable in
the relation of its form.” For Gropius, the design goal was to “balance
contrasts” through “an asymmetrical but rhythmical balance”.1
The client was the widow of Professor Robert Zuckerkandl, who came
from a Jewish family and worked in Vienna and Prague. When Therese
Zuckerkandl received a deportation notice in 1942, she took her own
life.2
1 Walter Gropius, Idee und Aufbau des staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar, Munich 1923,
p. 9. Published in English as “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus”, in: H
erbert
Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius (Eds.), Bauhaus 1919–1928, New York, 1938,
pp. 29–30.
2 Thorsten Büker, “Jenaer Bauhaus-Villa steht zum Verkauf für zehn Millionen”, in:
Ostthüringer Zeitung, 24 October 2017.
When Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928, Adolf Sommerfeld, who con-
tinuously supported the Bauhaus financially, commissioned him to pro-
duce an exhibition on the Berlin housing situation and social housing
construction in Berlin-Zehlendorf where Sommerfeld and his company,
Allgemeine Häuserbau A.G., were heavily involved in housing construc-
tion. The exhibition was directed by László Moholy-Nagy, who Gropius
valued for his artistic versatility and whose Constructivist tendencies are
reflected in the architecture.
“The AHAG exhibition,” wrote Adolf Behne, “is a new type of exhibition.
Here [...] the exhibition organizes the path of the attentive visitor, and
the path they take past certain objects in a certain unambiguous direc-
tion and sequence is identical with the train of thought of the exhibitors.
Here, the principles of modern book direction are applied for the first
time to an exhibition.”1
1 Adolf Behne, “AHAG-Ausstellung”, in: Internationale Revue i10, Vol. 17–18, 1928,
p. 94.
Garden café
101 Entrance area
Lewin House Berlin-Zehlendorf, Germany
1928–29
Gropius received the commission to build the residential building for the
publishing director Josef Lewin through a recommendation from Adolf
Sommerfeld.1 The building, which was originally planned as a skeleton
frame construction but was eventually constructed as a conventional
masonry building, takes the form of a composition of blocks of differ
ent height, with a dark base and cantilevered corners.2 The horizon-
tal windows with metal profiles are dimensioned according to uniform
modules. The central room of the house, the living and dining room,
opens to the east and onto a terrace to the south. The living area, fur-
nished only with Wassily chairs, could be separated from the dining
area by a curtain, which was also furnished with chairs designed by
Marcel Breuer. The rooms have a red linoleum floor and the surfaces
of the built-in wall cupboards had the same wood grain as the doors.
The clarity of the spaces is underlined by the flush positioning of the
door and wall cupboards and their uniform veneer.
In 1933, Josef Lewin fled Germany and the house was expropriated.
The composition of the house was later altered by the addition of a
side extension.
Site plan
Floor plan of apartment building
104 View of the entire first phase
Apartment building
105 West side
Dammerstock Housing Development
Site plan
Floor plan of apartment
108 Bird’s-eye view from the east
View from the south
View from the east
109 Northeastern block
Siemensstadt Housing Development Berlin-Siemensstadt, Germany
1929–30
The orientation of the bedrooms to the east and the living rooms to
the west is identical in both north-south blocks, resulting in bedrooms
that overlook the gardens to the rear on one block and the street on
the other. “What is more important for the average person: absolute
peace and quiet at night or afternoon and evening sunshine on the
balcony,”2 Gropius asked himself. The apartments of the gallery-access
block also overlook the street, turning their back on the large park-like
open space behind.3
1 Handwritten note on the back of photo 6740/5 in the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin. Cf.
Annemarie Jaeggi, “’brauchbare typen sind ständig zu verbessern’ – Die Dammerstock
siedlung im Werk von Walter Gropius”, in: Brigitte Franzen, Peter Schmitt, Neues Bauen
der 20er Jahre – Gropius, Haesler, Schwitters und die Dammerstocksiedlung in Karls
ruhe 1929, Karlsruhe 1997, p. 97.
2 Ibid., p. 95, cited in: Ise Gropius, “Die Gebrauchswohnung” in: Neue Hauswirtschaft,
11, 1929, p. 180.
3 The situation is better on the opposite side of the street where Hans Scharoun later
built a gallery-access block. The apartments in his block open on to the green space
and are shielded from the road.
Site plan
110 Floor plan of gallery-access block
Gallery-access block, north side
111 Gallery-access block, staircase
Siemensstadt Housing Development
1 Note in Walter Gropius’ office files from 19 November 1931, Bauhaus-Archiv B erlin,
cf.: Karsten Thieme, Kupferhäuser in Berlin und Brandenburg und der Einfluss von Wal-
ter Gropius auf ihre Entwicklung, Dissertation Technische Universität Berlin, 2012, p. 79.
2 Friedrich von Borries and Jens-Uwe Fischer, Heimatcontainer – Deutsche Fertighäuser
in Israel, Frankfurt am Main 2009.
For the exhibition “Sun, Air and House for Everyone!” two prefabricated
copper-plated houses were built on the Berlin Exhibition Grounds.1
Gropius collaborated here with Hirsch Kupfer- und Messingwerke, pre-
senting an additive system of modules that could be successively ex-
tended to meet changing needs. The larger of the two houses was an
extended variant of the smaller house rotated by 180 degrees so that
the terrace faced south-west. The south side of the larger house type
featured an adjoining greenhouse with inclined glazing, as also seen
in Hans Scharoun’s “Growing House” in the same exhibition. Another
development over the previous copper-plate house type was the use
of a horizontally grooved copper skin and a flat roof.
1 The houses are documented in: Martin Wagner, Das wachsende Haus – ein Bei
trag zur Lösung der städtischen Wohnungsfrage, Berlin 1932, pp. 65–68, and Hart-
mut Probst and Christian Schädlich, Walter Gropius – Band 1: Der Architekt und Theo
retiker, Berlin 1985, pp. 155–157.
2 Walter Gropius, “Programm zur Gründung einer allgemeinen Hausbaugesellschaft mit
künstlerisch einheitlichen Grundlagen m.b.H.” (programme for the founding of a general
housing-construction company following artistically uniform principles), manuscript in
the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Published in: Hartmut Probst and Christian Schädlich, Walter
Gropius – Band 3: Ausgewählte Schriften, Berlin 1987, p. 19.
The ground floor of the house is elevated half a storey above street
level so that a flight of cantilevered steps lead up to the entrance and
a ramp down to the garage. The house for the factory owner Johannes
Bahner1 is positioned directly on the step in the terrain close to the
street and has large windows opening on to the south-facing garden
at the rear. The windows are comprised of several identical panes, ex-
pressing the concept of modularity, and a continuous window cornice
groups the windows into horizontal bands, an effect further heightened
by the setting back of the pillars between the windows. The build-
ing’s dynamic composition is a product of cutting away a section of
the clear cubic volume at the entrance, causing the corner above to
protrude forward. Even though the conventionally constructed house
has a hipped roof with projecting eaves, its pitch is so shallow that it
looks like a flat roof and its eaves line echoes the forward edge of the
roof slab over the entrance.
1 The history of the design is unknown as earlier versions of the design are labelled “Gass
House”. See Winfried Nerdinger, The Architect Walter Gropius, Berlin 1985, p. 182, and
Hartmut Probst and Christian Schädlich, Walter Gropius – Band 1: Der Architekt und
Theoretiker, Berlin 1985, p. 194.
2 Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius – Work and Teamwork, New York 1954, p. 70.
As the entrance to the house is from the south, it is shifted back from
the street with the entrance placed to one side. The house for the
lawyer Otto Heinrich Maurer is situated opposite a park but appears
modest compared to the representative villas next to it. Its outward
appearance is very restrained1 and, as with the Bahner House built at
the same time, the pitched roof prescribed by the National Socialists
is all but invisible due to its shallow incline. The complicated incorpor
ation of the gutter into the roof further underlines the impression of a
flat roof. Considerable effort was invested in achieving the impression
of maximum simplicity.
In the L-shaped floor plan, the serving rooms such as the vestibule,
kitchen and maid’s room are minimised, while the living room – linked
to the dining room by a sliding door – is open and spacious. The dyna
mism of Gropius’ earlier residential buildings, achieved by pushing to-
gether different-sized building volumes, is put aside in favour of the
“classical” stability of a symmetrical frontage.
1 The clarity of the building volume came about during the design process. Earlier plans
show a projecting bay, a pergola on one side and a garage extension. See Winfried
Nerdinger, The Architect Walter Gropius, Berlin 1985, p. 183.
2 Walter Gropius, Die neue Architektur und das Bauhaus, Mainz 1965, p. 74, originally
published as: The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, London 1935.
The house for the playwright Benn Levy1 and the actress Constance
Cummings forms part of an overall composition together with the neigh-
bouring house designed by Erich Mendelsohn. The architects agreed
on the building heights, facade design and massing of the two adjoin-
ing houses. While Mendelsohn’s building for Levy’s nephew Dennis
Cohen is arranged parallel to the street and appears rigorously or-
thogonal, the Levy house stands at right angles to the street and has
curved sections, also on its street elevation. The Levy House, with
numerous rooms for domestic staff, opens onto a shared garden with
large south-east facing sliding glass panes. Sliding doors between the
dining room and living room likewise make it possible to combine them
into a single large space.
A storey was later added to the house and the roof terrace built over. In
addition, the house was clad in a dark colour due to the air pollution in
central London. Gropius later explained that he had drawn the c lient’s
attention to the problem of facade discoloration: “I was in favour of a
brick building, but Levy wanted to have a white house.”2
1 Benn Levy wrote the dialogue for the first British “talkie”, directed by Alfred Hitchcock,
who also produced a film that Levy directed. Levy also represented the Labour Party
as a Member of Parliament.
2 Walter Gropius in a letter to Edwin Maxwell Fry on 25 April 1938, RIBA Archive, cited
in: Ian Jackson, Jessica Holland, The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane
Drew – Twentieth Century Architecture, Pioneer Modernism and the Tropics, Farnham
2014, p. 73.
1 The showroom was published in the Architect’s Journal, 5 August 1937, pp. 229–
230, after Gropius had already left England for America. Although Gropius and Max-
well Fry, with whom he had an office partnership, are both named as the architects, the
project is not recorded by Giedion (1954) in his list of works. In Ian Jackson and Jessica
Holland’s book, The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew – Twentieth Century
Architecture, Pioneer Modernism and the Tropics, Farnham 2014, p. 336, a second
Electricity Showroom in London’s Regent Street dated 1937 is mentioned that is attri
buted to Gropius together with Maxwell Fry and László Moholy-Nagy.
2 The lettering no longer exists.
1 I would like to thank the architect John Pardey for his survey plans which served as
the basis for the plan shown here.
2 Reginald R. Isaacs, Walter Gropius – Der Mensch und sein Werk, Frankfurt am Main,
Berlin 1986, p. 774. A member of the office, Jack Howe, describes the project in a
letter to Jack Pitchard dated 12 July 1969 as a ‘bread and butter’ project and also de-
scribed Gropius’ displeasure with the client, in: ibid., p. 773.
1 “A Timber House in Kent”, in: Architectural Review, February 1938, pp. 61–63.
2 Ibid., p. 61.
3 Frances Donaldson, A Twentieth-Century Life, London 1992.
The aim of the building was to create a combined school and cultural
centre in a rural region.1 In addition to the classrooms, the building
also encompassed adult education facilities and a multifunctional audi
torium with theatre stage. As with the Bauhaus building, the wings,
which vary in shape depending on their function, extend in different
directions. The college stands at the edge of the village overlooking
the landscape and is embedded in an existing park, emphasising its
public character. The form of the building was arranged to preserve
as many of the existing mature trees as possible. Access is from the
north-west in the direction of the fan-shaped auditorium, with an en-
trance next to the auditorium that leads off into a promenade that con-
nects the wings of the classrooms and the wings of the communal fa-
cilities. Some of the school rooms are also used in the evenings for
extracurricular activities.
The classrooms open to the south-east and have a view across the
fields through glazed frontages that have sliding sections to allow semi-
open-air teaching. The common rooms, on the other hand, have typ-
ical English bay windows. The exterior walls, as well as some of the
indoor areas, are faced with yellow and dark brown bricks with a very
rough texture. The structural elements of the interiors are painted blue
while the walls are a light grey-green with “sulphur yellow” curtains.2
Mahogany panels were used on the walls.
1 The concept of the Village College was developed in the 1920s by Henry Morris, who
was responsible for education in Cambridgeshire. The intention was to help stem the
flow of people leaving rural areas by providing local facilities. See “The Village College
Idea”, in: Architectural Review, December 1939, pp. 225–226.
2 “Impington Village College”, in: ibid., p. 234.
3 Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius – Work and Teamwork, New York 1954, p. 70.
125
Impington Village College
For the second time, Gropius was able to build a house for himself
without having to raise the finances for it thanks to the generosity of a
patron.1 As with his house in Dessau, he worked with Marcel Breuer,
with whom he also established an office partnership. Gropius chose
a location in the Boston area after taking up a professorship at Harvard
University. The freestanding building crowns a hill in the landscape
near Walden Pond, made famous by the writer Henry David Thoreau.
From the entrance side, the building appears as a pure white cube
with horizontal window bands, similar to Gropius’ buildings from the
late 1920s. On entering, however, its character is more akin to that of
a house by Alvar Aalto in Finland than to the New Objectivity propa-
gated in America as the International Style. The house is constructed
of wood and the painted wood panelling is visible both outside and in-
side. S igfried Giedion wrote: “Within Gropius’ house at Lincoln there is
nothing that stresses its modernity. Living has simply, in some new and
subtle way, become pleasanter. The flow of space through the studio,
living-room and dining space on the ground floor is agreeably relaxing.”2
1 Helen Storrow procured the site and paid for the building’s costs. She rented the
house to Gropius and gave him the option to purchase it later.
2 Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius – Work and Teamwork, New York 1954, p. 72.
3 Walter Gropius, Architektur – Wege zu einer optischen Tradition, Frankfurt am Main,
Hamburg 1959, p. 11.
4 Walter Gropius in a letter to Marcel Breuer dated 17 April 1937, cited in: Winfried Ner
dinger, The Architect Walter Gropius, Berlin 1985, p. 194.
5 This is how Sigfried Giedion characterized the architecture. See footnote 2.
The building looks different from each side. Approaching the entrance,
one sees a white cubic volume looking out over the sea. The house is
partially elevated, and at the same time embedded in the rocky coastal
landscape, walls of rough stonework anchoring it firmly to the ground.
Resting on this massive foundation is a lightweight timber construc-
tion with membrane-like walls. In its detailing, some elements of the
building are reminiscent of naval architecture, while others have an ex-
tremely archaic character. Marcel Breuer, who claimed primary author-
ship of the design,1 had previously used similar rustic walls in his de-
signs for a pavilion in England and a hotel in Austria.
1 Marcel Breuer in a letter to Walter Gropius dated 10 September 1946, quoted in:
Joachim Driller, Breuer Houses, London 2000, p. 102. This house was completed in
1938. See “Hagerty Completion Statement” from 5 December 1938, Marcel Breuer Ar-
chive, Syracuse University, ID 11319-001.
2 Josephine Hagerty in a letter to Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer dated 26 Janu-
ary 1939, Marcel Breuer Archive, Syracuse University, ID 11329-008. “You insisted on
your own preconceived ideas without considering their adaptability to the existing con-
ditions or the likes and dislikes of your client.”
The house stands within sight of the Gropius house, and like Gropius,
Marcel Breuer was given the opportunity by the owner of the site to
design a house for himself without having to finance it. 1 Although Breuer
designed the house independently, it also appears in Gropius’ list of
works, as it was designed as part of their office partnership.
In contrast to the cubic volume of the Gropius House, this house looks
like an additive assembly of different volumes, reflecting the different
characters of the functional areas.2 The house was later extended.
Surrounded by trees and facing a pond, the house lies on the same
site as the houses for Gropius and Breuer. The modest building, which
Breuer had no part in designing,1 opens to the south overlooking the
water. The building is accessed via a staircase that juts out of the
north elevation, while to the south, a single-storey dining room extends
forward of the main rectangular form of the building. The proportions
of the floor plan adhere to the Golden Section, and the route through
the house follows an S-shaped path from the entrance to the terrace.
As in the neighbouring Gropius House, this path leads around a diag-
onally arranged glass wall that divides the living and dining areas while
maintaining a visual connection between them.
The terrace in front is contained by a curved dry stone wall. Like the
Gropius and Breuer houses from this period, and in contrast to the
New England vernacular, the timber cladding on the facades runs ver-
tically. Similarly, rather than overlapping the individual timber boards,
as was the convention, the vertical timber panelling is arranged flush
to form a smooth wall surface that underlines the geometric abstrac-
tion of the building.
1 Cf. Winfried Nerdinger, The Architect Walter Gropius, Berlin 1985, p. 271, and Joachim
Driller, Breuer Houses, London 2000, p. 102. The house, which was built in the office
partnership with Marcel Breuer, was later enlarged through the addition of an extension.
1 Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in a manuscript, Marcel Breuer Archive, Syracuse
University, ID 04476-003.
2 Ibid., ID 04476-002.
3 “House in Pittsburgh, PA. – Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, Architects”, in: The
Architectural Forum, March 1941, p. 162.
4 Cf. Joachim Driller, Breuer Houses, London 2000, pp. 132–137.
138
Ground floor plan with entrance
139 View from the garden
Frank House
Located near a river “in the middle of the woods”,1 the building is com-
posed of different cubic volumes. A light timber structure rests on a
massive pedestal of rough stone walls that serves as a shelter for a
canoe. The somewhat larger house rests on this pedestal, projecting
forward by over two metres. Other elements of the building also e xtend
outwards, including the entrance staircase and canopy as well as part
of the veranda. At the heart of the house is a stone chimney which
stands in the centre of the main space and separates the entrance
area from the living room.
1 Marcel Breuer in a letter to Francis Reginald Stevens Yorke dated 8 March 1943, cited
in: Joachim Driller, Breuer Houses, London 2000, p. 240.
2 Marcel Breuer in a letter to George Nelson dated 15 October 1942, Marcel Breuer
Archive, Syracuse University, ID 00138-001.
3 Marcel Breuer in a letter to Walter Gropius dated 23 May 1941: “I am now convinced
that our partnership is objectively and personally no longer possible. As to the reasons,
we each certainly have our own ideas, which I feel it would not help to analyse.” Marcel
Breuer Archive, Syracuse University, ID bMS_Ger_208_folder_518_0024.
Even though Marcel Breuer did not claim primary authorship of this
house,1 its open fireplace within the gently curving massive stone wall,
and the contrast between the rough stone surface and the lacquered
timber structure bears strong resemblances to Breuer’s own house in
Lincoln. To the south and west, the house is glazed across the entire
breadth of the facade, providing panoramic views through the ribbon
windows from almost all the rooms. The connection with the landscape
is most dramatically evident in the fully-glazed room at the southwest
corner of the building.
1 Breuer did not list this house as one of the works he was involved in designing dur-
ing his office partnership with Gropius. See his letter to Gropius dated 10 September
1946, quoted in: Joachim Driller, Breuer Houses, London 2000, p. 102.
The timber construction of the buildings is faced with yellow brick and
cedar. After visiting the completed settlement, Marcel Breuer conceded
that “tenants […] object to the natural wood on the exteriors which,
they think, indicates that there was not enough money for brick. It is
therefore suggested that the wood should be painted.”2 The wooden
shading devices above the long ribbon windows have since been re-
placed by aluminium elements.
1 Cf. “Aluminum City Terrace Housing”, in: The Architectural Forum, July 1944, pp. 65–76.
2 Marcel Breuer in: Architectural Review, September 1944, p. 74.
Site plan
Upper floor plan
Ground floor plan
146 Floor plan of semi-detached house type
Two-storey row, entrance side
147 Projecting section with bedrooms
Aluminum City Terrace
The General Panel System for prefabricated houses was designed for
mass production, but relatively few houses were actually built.1 The
prefabricated, lightweight timber construction elements were delivered
in a package and assembled on site in a very short space of time. For
the construction, Konrad Wachsmann developed a jointing system with
steel connecting pieces that made it possible to join panel modules
of about one metre in size vertically and horizontally.2 Compared with
Gropius’ earlier Copper Houses, this principle represented a major sim-
plification as it enabled all connections between wall, floor and ceiling
panels to be standardised.
The factory building lies between a railway line and a street and is clad,
like the adjoining office wing, with yellow and red brick. Its architectural
expression is dominated by the strong horizontality of the ribbon win-
dows, an impression further heightened by the dark brick base zone
and the repeating delineation of the facades through the insertion of
header courses at every ninth course of the otherwise regular running
bond masonry.
1 Walter Paepcke was the chairman of the company’s board of directors. See Reginald
R. Isaacs, Walter Gropius – Der Mensch und sein Werk, Berlin 1987, pp. 927–928.
2 Winfried Nerdinger mentions that Gropius also advised on changes to the factory in
Fernandina, Florida, of which there are numerous photographs in Gropius’ legacy in the
Berlin Bauhaus Archive, but no drawings. Winfried Nerdinger, The Architect Walter Gro-
pius, Berlin 1985, p. 278.
The cardboard and paper mill north of Cali on the Río Cauca was built
in several stages.1 Like the factory in Greensboro in the USA, which
was built at the same time, the factory is fronted by a two-storey office
building facing the road, on the roof of which the letters “Cartón de
Colombia” were later mounted as envisaged by Gropius. As in Greens-
boro, glazing runs along the entire front of the five-section o
ffice build-
ing, interrupted only by the external columns of the skeleton frame,
while the end walls are entirely unbroken. The factory building was
later extended as planned to the southwest through the addition of
further aisles with conventional pitched roofs and skylights. Since then
the building has undergone numerous alterations and the factory no
longer stands in open countryside but is now part of a densely built-
up industrial district.
1 While the design plans from the Gropius Archive are held at Busch-Reisinger Museum
at Harvard University, the aerial photograph shown here comes from the Bauhaus-Archiv
in Berlin, where it was erroneously labelled as the “Office and Factory Building for the Con-
tainer Corporation of America, Greensboro/N.C.” (Inv. No. 6792/23). I would like to thank
Liliana Naranjo Merino for her help in locating the building. The building is still used today as
a paper mill by Smurfit Kappa Cartón de Colombia S.A.
Site plan
151 Phase one of the factory complex at Río Cauca
Howlett House Belmont, Massachusetts, USA
1945–48 (with TAC)
The house for Clarence and Jeannette Howlett, like Marcel Breuer’s
house in Lincoln, extends over three levels, with stairs leading up and
down from a high living room to smaller rooms arranged on two levels
above one another. It was the first building to be completed by The
Architects Collaborative (TAC), which Gropius formed in 1945 together
with seven younger partners.1 All his later buildings were built in col-
laboration with TAC. Benjamin Thompson was the partner responsible
for this house, and Gropius worked with him to completely revise an
earlier preliminary design.
Although Gropius was not the lead architect for the project, serving
only as an architectural consultant to the planning team, he still influ-
enced the design of the complex. His input is visible in the layout of the
master plan with its park-like arrangement and the architectural design
of many of the buildings.2 As with the neighbouring IIT campus for the
Illinois Institute of Technology, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
at the same time, the buildings here were also uniformly faced with
yellow brick. In fact, the power plants of both complexes bear many
architectural similarities. Unlike Mies’ IIT, however, the pavilion build-
ings of the hospital were not arranged rigidly orthogonal to the street
grid, indeed the first of the buildings that Gropius contributed to – the
Singer Building, built in 1946-48 – has a Y-shaped ground plan. Gro-
pius himself played down his contribution, remarking: “Largely, advice
affecting good architectural design has not been implemented.”3 The
demolition of the hospital buildings in 2009–10 was accompanied by
public protests.
1 The hospital complex was demolished in 2009–10. Only the Singer Pavilion from
1946–48 was preserved.
2 Gropius advised on the architectural design of the buildings: Singer Pavilion, Laundry
Building, Serum Center, Power Plant, Friend Convalescent Home, Linear Accelerator,
Kaplan Pavilion and Cummings Pavilion.
3 Walter Gropius in a letter to Ferd Kramer dated 8 January 1951, cited in: Reginald R.
Isaacs, Gropius: An Illustrated Biography of the Creator of the Bauhaus, Boston 1991,
p. 266.
1 Walter Gropius et al. (Ed.), The Architects Collaborative TAC 1945–1965, Teufen 1966,
pp. 32–36. The responsible TAC partners were John C. Harkness and Louis A. McMillen.
2 Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius – Work and Teamwork, New York 1954, p. 59.
1 The participating artists also included Hans Arp, Richard Lippold and Joan Miró.
Cf.: Walter Gropius et al. (Ed.), The Architects Collaborative TAC 1945–1965, Teufen
1966, p. 71.
2 Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, New York 1962, p. 68. Originally pub-
lished on 23 October 1949 in New York Times Magazine.
3 Ibid., p. 69.
The house is entered via a large glazed entrance hall offering a visual
axis through the entire length of the building, while further diagonal
views from the adjoining living and dining room extend outwards to
create a sensation of maximum spaciousness. The door to this cen-
tral L-shaped room is wood-panelled like the wall, and a spiral stair-
case freely placed in the room leads up to the library.
“From far away its silhouette should be simple so that it can be grasped
at a glance,” Gropius explained at the time. “When we come closer […],
no longer able to see the whole edifice, the eye should be a ttracted by
a new surprise in the form of refined surface treatment.”2 In the case
of the brick wall panels, which alternate with rendered and recessed
surfaces in the facade, only the horizontal joints cast shadows, as the
vertical joints are flush with the brick surface. The recessing of the
rendered surfaces emphasised the wall-plane character of the brick
surfaces. The cubature of the house was later altered by the addition
of a single-storey extension.3
1 The owners were Wilhelm and Margret Stichweh, a businessman and a doctor. “Kleines
Wohnhaus in Hannover”, in: Bauen und Wohnen, 8/1953, pp. 450–452.
2 Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, New York 1962, p. 38. Originally pub-
lished as “Design Topics” in: Magazine of Art, December 1947.
3 The 1974 extension was designed by the architects Hübotter Ledeboer Busch. T oday,
the building is used by the BDA Association of German Architects.
The heart and lung clinic attached to the New England Deaconess
Hospital was connected to the hospital by a bridge.1 The building
was elevated so that cars can park beneath it and was accessed via
a glazed entrance hall. On the ground floor there were also technical
rooms and a staff room with another staircase leading to the upper
floor. The offices, consulting rooms and laboratories on the upper floor
were separated by lightweight, movable partitions,2 creating a flexible
structural framework, also achieved by dimensioning the steel skeleton
frame so that the building could be extended upwards.
1 Today the hospital is part of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. See “Thor
acic Clinic”, in: Walter Gropius et al. (Ed.), The Architects Collaborative TAC 1945–1965,
Teufen 1966, pp. 90–93. John C. Harkness was the responsible TAC Partner.
2 Reginald R. Isaacs, Walter Gropius – Der Mensch und sein Werk, Berlin 1987, p. 1032.
The floor plans of the apartments follow the apartment types of the
Siemensstadt and Dammerstock housing estates of the 1920s, even
though the skeleton construction made freer floor plans possible.4
The apartments follow the same pattern on eight floors, except that
the balconies are arranged partly in front of the living rooms and partly
to the side of the living rooms, lending the facades a chessboard-like
rhythm to counteract the impression of monotony. Nikolaus Pevsner,
however, suggested that this was mere formalism: “The arrangement
of the balconies seems at least to me more dictated by the wish for
such a surface pattern than by planning considerations.”5 The top floor
housed studio apartments with roof terraces and storage rooms were
located on the ground floor of the building, which had no basement. As
in the Siemensstadt project, the four stairwells are distinguished from
one another by means of different colours. The surface treatment of the
facade is also varied using blue paint for the undersides of the balco-
nies as well as different rendering textures. The rough and smooth sur-
faces lend the structure of the facade a sense of tectonic articulation.
1 Walter Gropius et al. (Ed.), The Architects Collaborative TAC 1945–1965, Teufen 1966,
pp. 94–97. Architect Wils Ebert was involved as the Berlin contact.
2 Reginald R. Isaacs, Walter Gropius – Der Mensch und sein Werk, Berlin 1984, p. 1073.
3 Walter Gropius in a letter to Ise Gropius dated 23 September1955, in: ibid., p. 1068.
4 The apartment floor plans are particularly conventional in comparison to the Alvar
Aalto Apartments.
5 Nikolaus Pevsner, “Berlin: City of Tomorrow”, in: The Listener, 8 August 1957,
pp. 197–199.
1 The embassy is clad in the same Pentelic marble that was used to build the Par-
thenon. Cf. Walter Gropius et al. (Ed.), The Architects Collaborative TAC 1945–1965,
Teufen 1966, p. 105.
2 Sigfried Giedion, Raum, Zeit, Architektur – Die Entstehung einer neuen Tradition, Basel,
Berlin, Boston 2015, pp. 325–326.
3 Ibid., p. 325.
4 Walter Gropius in: Peter Behrens, exhibition catalogue, Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern
1966, p. 5.
5 Walter Gropius in a postcard to Reginald R. Isaacs dated 14 June 1957, in: Reginald
R. Isaacs, Walter Gropius – Der Mensch und sein Werk, Berlin 1987, p. 1032.
6 “Amerikanische Botschaft in Athen”, in: Bauen + Wohnen, Vol. 12, 1959, p. 412.
The building, clad in limestone and red brick, was later altered both
inside and out. While the two long sides of the synagogue with their
rhythmic arched facades were originally identical, only the facade next
to the main entrance now remains after the addition of further exten-
sions. The interior of the synagogue was also completely redesigned:
while the room was originally entered from the north and sloped to the
south, today it is oriented in the opposite direction.
1 The narrow sides of the two halls could be opened with the help of large folding doors.
Cf.: Walter Gropius et al. (Ed.), The Architects Collaborative TAC 1945–1965, Teufen
1966, pp. 106–109.
2 The glass windows were designed by György Kepes who also designed the central
Ark of the Covenant.
Site plan
View from the north
171 Interior of the synagogue
University of Baghdad Baghdad, Iraq
1957–83 (with TAC and Kisham A. Munir)
Gropius was invited to build a university with 273 buildings on the banks
of the Tigris that was “to be a small town”,1 a commission brokered by
a former student whose father became prime minister of Iraq in 1957.2
To undertake the project, The Architects Collaborative opened another
office in Rome with at one point 150 employees,3 but due to political
upheavals in Iraq in the following years, execution was delayed and
only part of the design was ever realised.
Arranged around the central campus, enclosed within a ring road, were
clusters of student dormitories as well as a mosque designed as a
round dome. “All buildings are placed round patios of various sizes,
which are filled with plants, water basins, and fountains,” Gropius ex-
plained, “The interrelationship of the individual buildings and the land-
scaped open spaces with their water fountains between them, as well
as the shadow effects from the strong sunlight obtained by cantilevers
and undercuts will cause a significant rhythm.”5
1 Walter Gropius et al. (Ed.), The Architects Collaborative TAC 1945–1965, Teufen
1966, p. 124.
2 Nizar Ali Jawdat and his wife Ellen, who also studied with Gropius, met him in Bagh-
dad in 1954 and introduced him to leading figures in the country. Cf.: Regina Göckede,
Spätkoloniale Moderne – Le Corbusier, Ernst May, Frank Lloyd Wright, The Architects
Collaborative und die Globalisierung der Architekturmoderne, Basel, Boston, Berlin
2016, p. 352.
3 As described in: Winfried Nerdinger, The Architect Walter Gropius, Berlin 1985, p. 288.
4 Walter Gropius, “Universität in Bagdad”, in: Bauen + Wohnen, Vol. 11, 1959, p. 392.
5 Ibid.
6 In each of the three housing clusters the building scheme shown in the TAC publi-
cation of 1966 (see note 1) is repeated four times, partly in a mirrored arrangement,
while the northern cluster to the south is repeated again in a mirrored arrangement. In
terms of its urban planning, however, the housing follows only the original master plan.
The building is the only skyscraper in New York to stand above the in-
tersection of two streets. Although a tower was erected on Park A
venue
in 1929 above the underground railway lines of Grand Central Station,
the Pan Am Building is also situated on the axis of a road crossing.
Gropius and Pietro Belluschi were brought in by the architects Emery
Roth & Sons as consultants for the design and were responsible for
the outer form of the building, the compressed octagonal plan and the
detailing of the facade. Reportedly “Gropius’ most controversial com-
mission”,1 the project was subject to immense criticism, though more
due to the building’s magnitude and scale on the site than its design.2
Like the tower, the base building is clad with a facade of precast con-
crete elements. White quartz in the concrete mix gives it the charac-
ter of stone, an impression heightened at the base by the traditional
tectonic articulation of the facade. At the corners, in particular, the
impression is of heavy blocks stacked on top of each other, in con-
trast to the precast curtain-wall like concrete elements attached to the
facade of the tower.
1 Walter Gropius, speech on the occasion of the laying of the foundation stone on 12 No-
vember 1962, in: Hans Bandel and Dittmar Machule, Die Gropiusstadt – Der städtebau-
liche Planungs- und Entscheidungsvorgang, Berlin 1974, p. 76.
2 Walter Gropius in a letter to Rolf Schwedler dated 21 June 1966, in: ibid., p. 114.
3 Walter Gropius in a letter to Rolf Schwedler dated 19 April 1966, in: ibid., p. 112.
4 Walter Gropius in a letter to Hans Bandel dated 25 October 1966, in: ibid., p. 111.
The building complex is situated opposite the new Boston Town Hall,
built at the same time, with a paved plaza between the buildings. Built
as an administrative complex, it comprises a high-rise tower and a four-
storey building and stands on a platform reached via v arious flights
of steps. As with Mies van der Rohe’s buildings, the podium and the
crowning structure form an architectural unit. The formal p
rinciple draws
on an idea used for the Dreischeibenhaus in Düsseldorf and subdi-
vides the high-rise into staggered planes to give the building a slen-
der appearance,1 an impression further heightened by siting the glazed
stairwells in the gap between them. In the low building, meanwhile, a
long section cantilevers forward underlining the building’s horizontality.
The facing of the facade is hung from the skeleton frame and is made
of uniform precast concrete sections, while the base of the building is
clad with slabs of dark granite. The rounded corners of the buildings
make the facade look like an enclosing skin.
1 The TAC partner responsible for the project, Norman C. Fletcher, explained that the
design idea came directly from the Düsseldorf building completed in 1960. Norman C.
Fletcher, “The John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building in Boston”, in: National Gallery of
Art (Ed.), Symposium Papers XXX: Federal Buildings in Context, New Haven 1995, p. 41.
1 Walter Gropius et al. (Ed.), The Architects Collaborative TAC 1945–1965, Teufen
1966, p. 197.
2 Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin (Ed.), Walter Gropius – Bauten und Projekte 1906–1969, Berlin
1980, p. 24.
3 Alexander Cvijanovic, a native of Yugoslavia, spoke German and became a partner of
the office. Wils Ebert acted as the contact architect in Berlin for this building.
Site plan
186 Pavilion type 2
Floor plan of type 1 pavilion
187 Floor plan of type 2 pavilion
School and Kindergarten, Gropiusstadt
The two parts of this office building intersect as if one volume were
pushed under the other. The building volumes are articulated to look
as if they are separate, the flat surface of the low building passing be-
tween and behind the pillars of the tower without appearing to touch
them.1 The tower, built alongside a separate multi-storey car park, is
the sole prominent landmark in this otherwise low-rise suburban area
around Cleveland.
1 Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin (Ed.), Walter Gropius – Bauten und Projekte 1906–1969, Berlin
1980, pp. 26–27.
2 “A Suburban Office Building by TAC – Designed as Focal Point and Landmark”, in:
Architectural Record, March 1969, pp. 129–134.
Site plan
190 View from the east
191 Floor plan of the tower
Bauhaus Archive Berlin-Tiergarten, Germany
1964–79 (with TAC and Hans Bandel)
1 The construction planning was carried out by the office’s contact architect in Berlin
Hans Bandel. Cf.: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin (Ed.), Walter Gropius – Bauten und Projekte
1906–1969, Berlin 1980, pp. 24–25, and Reginald R. Isaacs, Gropius: An Illustrated
Biography of the Creator of the Bauhaus, Boston 1991, p. 291.
1 The architect responsible for the design in the TAC office was Alexander Cvijanovic.
Hartmut Probst and Christian Schädlich, Walter Gropius – Band 1: Der Architekt und
Theoretiker, Berlin 1985, pp. 288–289.
2 Walter Gropius cited in: Reginald R. Isaacs, Walter Gropius – Der Mensch und sein
Werk, Berlin 1987, p. 1101.
Site plan
195 Greenhouse
Rosenthal Porcelain Factory
Storage building
Factory entrance
196 Silo
“After-work building”, view from the road
197 Entrance from the yard
Huntington Galleries Huntington, West Virginia, USA
1967–70 (with TAC)
Of the five adjacent ateliers, only three were realised according to the
plans by The Architects Collaborative. The southern building was later
built in a modified form. The ateliers are likewise illuminated with the
same half-barrel vaults as the museum. For Gropius, these rooms for
use as adult education spaces and by children were a key part of the
overall concept, as it is here, as he explained in his speech at the lay-
ing of the foundation stone, that future generations learn to look at
the world.3
1 Gropius collaborated with Malcom Ticknor on the design in the TAC office. The mu-
seum’s original building from 1950–52 was designed by the architects Small, Smith &
Reeb. See the chapter “Walter Gropius and the Huntington Galleries”, in: John Coolidge,
Patrons and Architects – Designing Art Museums in the Twentieth Century, Fort Worth
1989, pp. 59–68.
2 Ibid., p. 61.
3 Ibid., p. 62.
Site plan
Inner courtyard
198 Exibition area skylight
199 Ground floor plan
Amberg Glass Factory Amberg, Germany
1967–70 (with TAC)
1 Philip Rosenthal commissioned Gropius to build the factory for a subsidiary of Rosen-
thal, the Thomas Glas- und Porzellan AG. Gropius again worked with Alexander Cvijanovic
on the project design. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin (Ed.), Walter Gropius – Bauten und Projekte
1906–1969, Berlin 1980, p. 26, and: Hartmut Probst and Christian Schädlich, Walter Gro-
pius – Band 1: Der Architekt und Theoretiker, Berlin 1985, pp. 290–291.
2 The system of permanent air circulation is no longer ideal for modern-day production
machinery.
Site plan
200 View from the northwest
View from the northeast
201 View from the northwest
Amberg Glass Factory
Inner courtyard
202 Interior
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205
Subject Index
abstraction 22, 34, 54, 58, 60, 65, 67, 134, 136, 160, 168
12, 22, 38, 54, 58, 60, 65, 78, 85, 94, 100, 136, 160 reconstruction
base 22, 44, 60, 78, 84, 85
17, 20, 22, 25, 27, 28, 38, 48, 58, 84, 85, 100, 102, 108, 110, 124, rhythm
143, 150, 175, 181, 190 22, 34, 38, 62, 100, 110, 164, 171, 172
brick roof terrace
22, 24, 28, 36, 40, 94, 108, 110, 119, 125, 145, 150, 153, 154, 15, 26, 40, 62, 66, 84, 92, 100, 119, 138, 164
156, 160, 162, 171, 198 routes
cladding 40, 101, 136, 156, 171, 192
40, 51, 84, 92, 94, 110, 114, 119, 124, 125, 128, 138, 145, 150, sequence of spaces
152, 154, 156, 168, 171, 175 54, 62, 67, 84, 101, 118, 128, 134, 143, 145, 152, 156, 160, 162,
colour 171, 186, 198
25, 40, 46, 51, 52, 54, 56, 58, 62, 65, 66, 78, 84, 86, 94, 100, skeleton frame construction
102, 108, 125, 138, 145, 150, 153, 154, 156, 164, 171, 186, 198 12, 28, 56, 58, 65, 67, 92, 94, 102, 122, 124, 138, 151, 162,
concrete 164, 181
17, 28, 44, 56, 58, 65, 66, 67, 85, 86, 143, 154, 162, 168, 175, spatial arrangement
181, 186, 190, 192, 195, 198, 200 17, 38, 108, 145, 172, 178, 186
conversion spatial concept
26, 50, 54, 58, 121, 154, 160 12, 13, 60, 62, 66, 67, 92, 101, 108, 134, 143, 145, 156, 171,
corner 172, 186, 200
10, 20, 24, 28, 36, 48, 62, 67, 84, 92, 94, 102, 108, 110, 114, 116, stairs
122, 144, 175, 181, 190 25, 26, 28, 40, 50, 54, 62, 65, 67, 100, 110, 116, 122, 136, 138,
detailing 143, 152, 156, 160, 162, 164, 172, 175, 181, 186, 198
25, 26, 48, 66, 67, 78, 121, 122, 132, 138, 175 stone
exhibition 13, 20, 22, 25, 44, 48, 59, 124, 132, 134, 136, 138, 143, 144,
15, 18, 27, 40, 60, 85, 92, 101, 104, 114, 115, 164, 192, 198 152, 156, 168, 171, 175
function surface
12, 58, 65, 66, 67, 84, 85, 125, 128, 134, 186 13, 27, 28, 36, 38, 44, 50, 52, 54, 65, 67, 102, 121, 125, 136,
furnishing 144, 156, 160, 164, 186, 190, 198
15, 18, 46, 50, 60, 62, 66, 84, 85, 86, 92, 94, 100, 102, 104, 116, tectonics
134, 138, 152 12, 46, 48, 52, 65, 164, 175
hall typology
13, 25, 40, 50, 52, 60, 85, 125, 151, 154, 160, 162, 171, 190, 12, 13, 18, 34, 38, 52, 86, 101, 108, 114, 115, 149, 160, 164,
192, 195, 198, 200 168, 172
landscape unity
17, 66, 125, 128, 132, 138, 144, 145, 152, 154, 172, 195, 198 10, 12, 18, 27, 36, 60, 66, 94, 116, 119, 121, 128, 138, 145, 149,
light 172, 181
13, 15, 40, 50, 52, 54, 60, 65, 66, 94, 101, 108, 138, 151, 171, urban design
172, 198 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 38, 104, 108, 110, 164, 172, 178, 195
loadbearing structure variability
12, 20, 27, 28, 40, 46, 52, 56, 58, 65, 66, 67, 92, 94, 101, 102, 12, 34, 92, 114, 115, 149, 178
114, 122, 124, 138, 143, 149, 151, 162, 164, 168, 181, 195, 200 view to the exterior
membrane 125, 144, 160, 195, 198, 200
13, 40, 52, 114, 115, 121, 124, 132, 168, 181 volume
module 10, 22, 34, 36, 38, 58, 62, 65, 66, 78, 85, 94, 100, 102, 108, 116,
12, 34, 102, 115, 116, 149, 162, 168, 171, 172, 186, 190, 195 118, 119, 124, 125, 128, 132, 134, 136, 143, 144, 160, 162, 168,
monument 171, 172, 175, 181, 190
12, 15, 27, 40, 94, 168, 172, 200 wall
objectivity 22, 24, 27, 28, 58, 65, 84, 85, 86, 92, 94, 102, 116, 132, 134,
10, 13, 40, 46, 52, 58, 60, 65, 110, 128, 156 136, 144, 160
podium wood
26, 124, 143, 168, 175, 181 10, 46, 48, 51, 52, 54, 65, 101, 102, 114, 124, 128, 132, 134, 136,
proportion 138, 143, 144, 145, 149, 152, 160
206
Illustration Credits
All other figures and photographs are from the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Selec-
ted photographs can be attributed to the following photographers/sources:
I. L. Allwork: 124
Atelier Helene Hüttich – Susanne Oemler: 63 top
Baubüro Gropius: 86
Bayer & Schmölz: 40–43
Annelise Bousset: 101 left
British Council: 127 bottom
Daderot: 198 top
Paul Davis: 133, 134
Herrmann Eckner: 54, 55
Gottscho-Schleisner: 145
Walter Gropius: 56, 58
Haskell: 136
Louis Held: 100 left
Keystone View Company: 66
Edmund Lill: 28
Dr. Lossen & Co: 93
Meriman Photo Art: 149
Lucia Moholy: 79, 85 right, 101 right
Joseph W. Molitor: 171 right, 175
Sidney W. Newbery: 120 top
Louis Reens: 169, 171 left, 198 bottom
Carl Rogge: 47 top, 102
Stefan Rosenbauer: 108, 109 top
Rosenthal GmbH: 195
Ezra Stoller: 139, 152, 154, 190
Fred Stone: 157
Adolf K. Fr. Supper: 105 top
Emil Theis: 95
Otto Wedekind: 85 right
207
About the Author
208