Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius was a German architect, one of the founders of the Bauhaus School. Gropius started his independent practice as an architect in 1910. By the Bauhaus years, he had already designed several buildings that would have a great impact on modernist architecture, including the Fagus shoe factory in Alfeld. He headed the Bauhaus School from it’s opening in Weimar in 1919 until 1928. Beginning in 1926, Gropius was actively involved in mass housing projects and designed Törten estate in Dessau (1926–1931) and Dammerstock (1928–1929). Following the rise of the Nazis in Germany, in 1934 he left the country for England and in 1937 moved to the USA, where he took a teaching job at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Towards the end of his life, Gropius returned to Berlin, where he designed a complex of nine-storey apartment blocks in Hansaviertel (1957), still considered to be among the greatest examples of late modernism.