Walter Gropius - An illustrated biography - Beau Livre

Walter Gropius, architect, designer and visionary founder of the Bauhaus, was e of the most influential and celebrated pioneers of Modernism. More than fifty years after his death, he remains a protean figure, whose extraordinary life s shaped by, and in turn shaped, the twentieth century. Beginning with his shattering experiences in World War I, this illustrated biography tells the story of his early career, the establishment of the Bauhaus in 1919 and the evolution of the school's radical philosophy of art, design and architecture.
First in Weimarand then in Dessau, Gropius assembled a world-class teaching faculty - a constellation of talents, which included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszló Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer and Josef and Armi Albers. Gropius' early architectural masterpieces, his Fagus Factory of 1911, the office building for the Werkbund exhibition of 1914 end his Dessau Bauhaus buildings and Masters' Houses of 1926, ere Modernist Iandmarks.They proposed a new vocabulary of industrial materiels, transparency and geometric rigour.
'A breach has been made with the past', he declared. Following Gropius' decision to leave Nazi Germany in 1934, the story explores his life as an impoverished exile in London and his subsequent move to the USA in 1937. As director of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, end later as n equal member of the youthful partnership The Architects Collaborative (TAC), he influenced a newdyntsty of international Modern architects.
Ina career spanning almost six decades, Gropius worked right up until his death in 1989. The person who emerges from these pages is a man of enormous passion, intellect and conviction, who maintained a lifelong band of loyal and affectionate collaborators. Gropius'work ranged from architecture, to designs fortrains, cars, furniture, and even teapots - all of which feature in this biography. But what is most striking, and what this book uniquely reveals, is Gropius' enormous resilience in the face of war, personal tragedy, financial loss and political pressures.
Time and again, he turned his beckon enormous adversity and continued onwards towards his vision.