Walter Gropius Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Architect, born in Berlin in 1883 and died in Boston in 1969. He studied architecture in Munich (1903) and Berlin (1905-1907). Read the full biography

Walter Gropius Biography

Architect, born in Berlin in 1883 and died in Boston in 1969. He studied architecture in Munich (1903) and Berlin (1905-1907). From 1908 to 1910 he collaborated in Peter Behrens' studio, after which he opened his own architectural studio in Berlin. From then on, until 1925, he worked in collaboration with Adolf Meyer. In 1911 he designed and built the Fagus factory in Alfeld, where there are formal innovations: with glass and steel perceived as "without essence" (Gropius) he gave the building a compact and at the same time transparent corporeality. For the first time, infill walls made of glass were applied to a multi-storey masonry building. The unsupported corners of the building's transparent cladding, which allow the landings suspended in the air to be seen inside, contradicted traditional conceptions of stability.

In 1919 he was called to direct the "Arbeitsrat für Kunst" in Berlin. In the same year he took over the direction of the "Kunsthochschule" (Art Academy) in Weimar, which on 1 April 1919 became the "Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar". He directed the Bauhaus until April 1928; from March 1921 to April 1925 he was the "master of forms" in carpentry. After moving to Dessau he designed the new Bauhaus building (1925-1926).

It is Karlsruhe-Dammerstock from 1930. Since 1928 he has practiced his profession in Berlin, carrying out an intense activity as a lecturer on issues relating to the "new way of building" and the Bauhaus. From 1934 to 1937 he worked in London in collaboration with Maxwell Fry. In 1937 he was called to the United States to Harvard, to the "Graduate School of Design", where, starting from 1938, he became director of the architecture section. In the same year he organized the "Bauhaus 1919-1928" exhibition in New York and built his house in Lincoln (Mass.). From 1938 to 1941 he ran an architectural studio in collaboration with Marcel Breuer. In 1946 he founded (Cambridge/Mass.) the studio "The Architects Collaborative" (TAC) with a group of his former students, and with this acronym he signed his post-war works: in particular the Harvard Graduate Center (1949-50 ) and the US embassy in Athens (1956). The project for a Bauhaus Archive based in Darmstadt dates back to 1964/65 and was then actually built in Berlin (1976-1979). Gropius is unanimously considered one of the greatest contemporary architects. Indeed, the Fagus factory and the Bauhaus buildings constitute so many milestones in the history of modern architecture. For the Bauhaus, Gropius represented, even after the end of his experience as director of the school, the true inspiring personality and reference authority. It is no coincidence that even after the closure of the school he always worked to ensure that the ideas that had been the basis of its foundation were known and valorised.

Gropius' contribution to modern architecture, important on a linguistic level, becomes decisive on a didactic level: an entire strand of rationalism would be unthinkable without the theoretical reflection and didactic experience of the German master. In Gropius' methodical theory, in fact, all architectural disciplines, from design to urban planning, find a precise functional position, under the banner of the methodological principle.