Bauhaus Man

Under the direction of scholarly, cultivated George Harold Edgell, Harvard's School of Architecture for many years gave sound traditional training to graduate students, attracted few young rebels to its courses. Last week the School of Architecture startled the U. S. building world by offering a professorship to Walter Gropius, one of the founders of the concrete-pipe-and-plate-glass school of architectural modernism known as the "International Style."* Herr Gropius, since 1934 a self-exile from Nazi Germany, cordially accepted.

Fifty-three-year-old Walter Gropius has architecture in his blood. His great uncle was an architect. His father was a member of the Berlin Building Commission. Educated at technical schools in Berlin and Munich, he built his first houses in 1906, by 1910 had already designed an undecorated factory with great screen walls of windows, later a standard practice in the International Style. He was passionately interested in low-cost housing and an architecture that would need to borrow nothing from traditional styles. When the War came, he fought in the Imperial Army, and it was not until after the Armistice that he could get back to his draughting board.

In 1919 Walter Gropius was appointed director of the rather stodgy Grand Ducal Art School at Weimar. He attracted a group of young students interested in functional, non-eclectic building design and in the economic, social and philosophical ideas that went with it. Early Nazi activity in Weimar made the town too hot for him; in 1925 Director Gropius was glad when the city of Dessau offered funds and a site for a long, barrack-like dormitory and school building which Gropius called the Bauhaus (Building House).

No history of modern architecture is complete without many pages on the work of the Dessau Bauhaus, which in the years of its existence did as much for city planning, furniture design and painting as it did for architecture. Director Gropius has always insisted that he is no Red. After he left in 1928 to do low-cost housing work in Berlin, however, the school became a hotbed of Communism. But despite the fact that the unembarrassed Reds of both sexes slept and bathed together, the story goes that only one illegitimate child was ever born to the Dessau Bauhaus. When nosy Dessau city fathers tried to expel the mother, the excited students paraded through the streets of the town, singing Communist songs, waving banners, carrying the baby proudly aloft.

Nationalistic Adolf Hitler denounced the simple Bauhaus style as "Oriental," and it was one of the first institutions closed by the Nazis in 1933. Subsequently it became a Landschule where domestic science was taught to country girls.

* Other early Internationalists: Germany's Mies van der Rohe, Holland's J. J. P. Oud, Switzerland's Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.