The Idea-Giver

"Gropius," he would say by way of introducing himself, which often left the other person fumbling momentarily for the master builder's first names. It should have come as easily as Frank Lloyd.

But where Wright designed soaring, poetic buildings that smote the eye and branded their creator's name in the memory, Walter Adolf Gropius was cogent.

He was modern architecture's idea-giver, analytical thinker and greatest educator. Professionally active and alert to the end of his 86 years, he died in Boston of complications following heart surgery. There was no funeral in the usual sense. "Wear no signs of mourning," he had instructed. "It would be beautiful if my friends would get together drinking, laughing, loving--all more fruitful than graveyard oratory." And so, 70 friends gathered last week to feast and recall the great architect.

Immediate Landmark. Born in Berlin in 1883, trained there and in Munich, Gropius was quick to grasp the liberating potentials of fast-developing technology. In 1911, he designed with Adolf Meyer a shoe factory in Alfeld, Germany. Unlike most buildings of the time, which were held up by thick exterior walls, the structure was supported by Bessemer steel interior columns and beams and faced with a breathtakingly thin curtain of glass. It was bold, light, airy--an immediate landmark. Soon after, Gropius produced another tour de force: a machine factory in Cologne whose facade was dominated by a pair of glass-sheathed spiral staircases that looked as cold and tense as ice around a coiled spring.

In 1919, Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar, probably the most stimulating and revolutionary design school of all time. Artists Paul Klee, Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky taught alongside Architects Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe, among others, sharing their excitement with one another and the students. They brought together all the arts: weaving and furniture-making, as well as graphics, painting and architecture. Their work, regardless of medium, material or size, recognized the force of industrialism and the beauty of the machine. It was an entirely new way of looking at the world.

From the Bauhaus drawing boards, lean, well-proportioned buildings came forth to challenge the Gothic, Baroque and neoclassic structures of the day. One of the best examples of the austere new look was Gropius' design for the Bauhaus' second home in Dessau. Flat-topped and structurally spare, the building had horizontal bands of windows that made it seem to hover effortlessly above rather than rest heavily on the ground. Such buildings had no more of a distinct national style than a locomotive, a chair, a doorknob, or any other machine-made object.

To Make a Baby. Gropius always resisted being credited with any style. Architecture, he believed, had to be a collaborative process, with the architect as natural leader of a team including manufacturers of building materials, artists, scientists and sociologists. This was of course contrary to the old idea of the architect as solitary creator and was hard to accept. Frank Lloyd Wright, a noted individualist, once snapped: "Gropius, I suppose that if you were planning to have a baby, you would turn to a neighbor for collaboration." "I would," replied Gropius, "if my neighbor was a woman."

Though he was not Jewish, Gropius left Germany in disgust at the rise of the Nazis in 1934, worked in London for three years, then came to the U.S. In 1938, he accepted the post of chairman of Harvard's Department of Architecture, and the school quickly became the focus of young talent, including such now famous architects as Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph, Ulrich Franzen, John Johansen and I. M. Pei. Gropius insisted that their work meet society's needs and that they move ahead alongside industry--until then largely overlooked by architects as a partner in their art. A technical innovation like the prefabricated glass-and-plastic facade, he knew, could be used as excitingly as hand-hewn marble. In this way, he prepared two generations of architects to meet the pressures of the postwar building boom and inspired them to want to produce beautifully.

For all his impact on architecture, practical success did not come for Walter Gropius until he was in his mid 70s. In 1945, he opened a Cambridge, Mass., office, called The Architects Collaborative, but his teaching left little time for commercial design. It was only after Gropius left Harvard in 1952 that the big, award-winning commissions started to come in: the U.S. embassy in Athens, the University of Baghdad, academic buildings for Phillips Academy at Andover, Harvard and Brandeis Universities. At his death, his firm had $315 million worth of work in progress, including a satellite city (named Gropiusstadt) outside Berlin, a vast medical complex in Boston, and the I.B.M. World Trade Center in Teheran.

In a sense, though, Gropius lived to be disappointed. Rationality in architecture, which reached its peak with the highly disciplined, exquisitely refined towers of Mies van der Rohe in the 1950s, has been cheapened by the slick, boxy, formula buildings that proliferate in every city like frozen dinners in a supermarket. The architect's imagination is now captured by bold, brutal structures of raw concrete; or intricate multilevel structures, designed with the help of a computer; or "pop" buildings that seem to revel in the chaotic interplay of roof lines, angles, windows, colors. Yet all the architects who rebel against Gropius' cool, functional logic paradoxically owe to him their method and ethic. He laid, in the hard soil of reason, the strong and deep foundations for them to build on.

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