Walter Gropius

WALTER GROPIUS

•Gropius’s House•Pan Am Building

Introduction:

• Born: May 18, 1883 in

Berlin, Germany• Died: July 5, 1969• Full Name: Walter Adolph Gropius• Education: Technical Universities

in Munich and Berlin

Introduction

• A German architect.• Art educator.• Founder of the Bauhaus School 

which became a dominant force in architecture and the applied arts in the 20th century.

He is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.

Selected Works:

i. 1910-1911:Fagus work’s, Alfred an der Leine, Germany

ii. 1925:The Bauhaus building, Dessau, Germany

iii. 1937:Gropius house, Lincoln, MA

iv. 1950:Harvard graduation center, Cambridge, MA

v. 1963:Pan am building, in collaboration with Pietro Belluschi, New York

•Worked under the German architect Peter Behrens from 1907-10.One of the first members of the utilitarian school. His fellow employees at this time included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Dietrich Marcks.

•He was influenced by the writings of Frank Lloyd Wright. 

•In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee Adolf Meyer established a practice in Berlin.

•Together they share credit for one of the seminal modernist buildings created during this period: Faguswerk in Germany, a shoe last factory. Although Gropius and Meyer only designed the facade, the glass curtain walls of this building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflects function and Gropius's concern with providing healthful conditions for the working class.

•Other works of his early period include the office and factory building for the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) in Cologne.

Career life of Walter Gropius:

•In 1913, Gropius published an article about "The Development of Industrial Buildings," which included about a dozen photographs of factories and grain elevators in North America.• A very influential text, this article had a strong influence on other European modernists, including Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelssohn, both of whom reprinted Gropius's grain elevator pictures between 1920 and 1930.•Gropius's career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Called up immediately as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years, and was wounded and almost killed.

Career life of Walter Gropius:

Projects:

•Walter Gropius opposed the Nazi regime and left Germany secretly in 1934. •After several years in England, Gropius began teaching architecture at Harvard University. •As a Harvard professor, Gropius introduced concepts and design principles – teamwork ,standardization, and prefabrication.•He lived and worked in Britain, as part of the Isokon group with Fry.

GROPIUS HOUSE:• In 1937, moved on to

the United States. • The house he built for

himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, (now known as Gropius House)

• it was influential in bringing International Modernism to the U.S.

• It had a dramatic impact on American architecture.

GROPIUS HOUSE:

•  Its detailing keeps strongly to the principles of the Bauhaus.  exploiting simple, well-designed but mass-produced fittings for steel wall lights, chromed banisters etc., as well as in the structure of the house (glass block walls complementing the wooden frame and New England clapboarding).

GROPIUS HOUSE:

The house is designed and detailed to work almost theatrically as a whole. The lighting in the dining room, mixes a single art-gallery spotlight recessed in the ceiling, whose beam exactly covers the circular table but not the diners a second spotlight in the study.

GROPIUS HOUSE:

Gropius uses interior clapboard for further ingenious lighting effects: set vertically on the walls of the entrance hall, the angle of each overlapping board stops light, rather than rain, reaching the near edge of its neighbor the result is an appealing pattern of shadows generated by the contrastingly simple mass-produced wall lights.

Pan Am Building

MetLife Building skyscraper located in New York City. It was the largest commercial office

building in the world when it opened on March 7, 1963

one of the fifty tallest buildings in the United States.

Pan Am originally had 15 floors in the Pan Am Building

Architecture of Pan Am Building Designed by Emery Roth

& Sons with the assistance of Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi.

Building is an example of an International style skyscrapers.

 large floors, simple massing, and an absence of ornamentation inside or out.

Design

The design is inspired by a never built project from Le Corbusier and by the slender Pirelli Towerin Milan (Gio Ponti and Pier Luigi Nervi, 1959.The exterior is covered with concrete panels to strengthen the building visually. The 246 meter tall building was completed in 1963 and incorporates an immense 390,700 m2 office space.

Statistics of Pan Am Building Height: 808 ft

(246.6 m) Floors:59 (above

ground) Floor space: 3.14

million ft² (307,000 m²)

The Architects' Collaborative (TAC) •In 1945, Gropius founded The Architects' Collaborative (TAC) based in Cambridge with a group of younger architects. The original partners included Norman C. Fletcher, Jean B. Fletcher, John C. Harkness, Sarah P. Harkness, Robert S. MacMillan, Louis A. MacMillen, and Benjamin C. Thompson. TAC would become one of the most well-known and respected architectural firms in the world.•TAC went bankrupt in 1995.•Gropius died in 1969 in Boston,aged 86. Today, he is remembered not only by his various buildings but also by the district of Gropiusstadtin Berlin.•In the early 1990s, a series of books entitled The Walter Gropius Archive was published covering his entire architectural career.