1883-1969 Architect, educator; born in Berlin, Germany.
He married Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel.
He directed the Bauhaus School in Weimar Germany from 1919 to 1928. Here he met Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Joseph Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breuer and Piet Mondrian among many others.
He is responsible for a major change in the sturcture of schools. Prior to Bauhaus, Science curriculum and Fineart curriculums were dicrete. The new paradigm put them back together. So you have students taking classes in strength of materials in the morning and life drawing in the afternoon. The idea being there is no real reason to separate them. His most famous idea was "Form follows function" meaning that what something does should have more to do with it's final shape than aesthetics.
He practiced architecture in Berlin and London. He was partly responsible for the rise of the International Style which he, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier promoted.
He came to the U.S.A. in 1937 and headed the architecture school at Harvard (1938--52), where he replaced the beaux arts curriculum with modern training. He founded The Architects Collaborative (1945). An internationally influential functionalist theoretician and practitioner, designed the Pan American Building.
He was featured in the Tom Wolfe book, "From Bauhaus to Our House".
Related:
Source:
Whitford, Frank, "Bauhaus", Thames and Hudson, London, 1984
Last Updated 06.20.04