Walter Gropius, 1883-1969: The Promoter of a New Form (Taschen Basic Architecture)
by Gilbert Lupfer
from Taschen
Born and educated in Germany, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) belongs to the select group of architects that massively influenced the international development of modern architecture. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, Gropius made inestimable contributions to his field, to the point that knowing his work is crucial to understanding Modernism. His early buildings, such Fagus Boot-Last Factory and the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, with their use of glass and industrial features, are still indispensable points of reference. After his emigration to the United States, he influenced the education of architects there and became, along with Mies van der Rohe, a leading proponent of the International Style.
Classic Modern Homes of the Thirties: 64 Designs by Neutra, Gropius, Breuer, Stone and Others (Modern House in America)
by James Ford
from Dover Publications
Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture As Sexual Ideology
by E. Michael Jones
from Ignatius Press
The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy
In answering the critic Clement Greenberg's query "why all those ugly buildings?" Klaus Herdeg lays the blame directly at the feet of Walter Gropius and the curriculum at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Herdeg contends that the work of many of America's leading architects who studied under Gropius-Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei. John Johannsen, and Edward Barnes among them - commands visual interest through an almost total absence of design, resulting in the banal and sterile quality of so much of modern architecture. He builds his case through meticulous comparisons of dozens of buildings.
Klaus Herdeg is Professor of Architecture at Columbia University.
Walter Gropius (Dover Books on Architecture)
by Sigfried Giedion
from Dover Publications
Twentieth Century Classics (Architecture 3s) Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Louis I. Kahn
by Dennis Sharp
from Phaidon Press
Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus Legacy at Harvard (Center Books)
by Jill Pearlman
from University of Virginia Press
From the late 1930s to the early 1950s, the Harvard Graduate School of Design played a crucial role in shaping a new modern architecture and the modern city. Architects, planners, teachers, and students from all over the world looked to the new GSD, with its celebrated faculty and curriculum, for the path to modern design. While the school's significance is widely recognized by architectural historians, most studies have concentrated on the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and his transformation of Harvard's old Beaux-Arts School of Architecture into a "Harvard-Bauhaus," a radically new school with a single outlook. In Inventing American Modernism, Jill Pearlman argues that Gropius did not effect these changes alone and, further, that the GSD was not merely an offshoot of the Bauhaus. She offers a crucial missing piece to the story--and to the history of modern architecture--by focusing on Joseph Hudnut, the school's dean and founder.
After heading the architecture school at the University of Virginia, and then at Columbia University, Hudnut created the GSD at Harvard in 1936, before Gropius was appointed, and he headed the school until 1953, the year after Gropius resigned. From the beginning, Hudnut gave the GSD its modern pedagogical direction, and he continued to oversee its curriculum and staffing for the next seventeen years. Although originally an admirer of Gropius's work and theories, Hudnut came to clash with him over the control of the direction of modern architecture and planning in the United States Gropius won the battle, but Pearlman shows that, had the GSD followed the path Hudnut wanted, modern architecture and the modern city might well have been different.
In his role as public intellectual, Hudnut wielded an influence that reached outside the university, distinguished by his encouraging people to participate in the architectural and urbanistic matters that affected their lives. A story involving European modernists such as Marcel Breuer, Martin Wagner, and Christopher Tunnard, as well as a number of other architects, city planners, and landscape architects, this book is more than the study of a single school; it is a look at the origins of modernism at a defining moment in the history of twentieth-century architecture.
Published in association with the Center for American Places
Gropius: An Illustrated Biography of the Creator of the Bauhaus
Dream of the Factory-Made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann
This is the story of what came to be known as the "packaged house," one of the few architect-inspired attempts to manufacture and market a prefabricated home. The plan began in the 1940s as a major collaborative effort between Walter Gropius, then at the height of his fame, and Konrad Wachsmann, a rising star-both in exile from their native Germany. For both men, this was the culmination of many years of experience in the field of industrialized housing and an unparalleled opportunity to make their long-cherished dream of a factory-made house a reality. How did this venture, which seemed to have everything going for it, turn out to be such a dismal failure? The answers to that question make this one of the most fascinating studies in the annals of modern architecture.
Gilbert Herbert's analysis of the bold undertaking has within it not only the elements of personal drama, as far as Gropius and Wachsmann are concerned, but it unfolds consequences of more drastic significance for the development of industrially-produced housing the world over. Both architects represented a formidable combination of ability and experience; both had contributed significantly to the theory and practice of prefabrication, and had devised a system that was technically impeccable. That "only a small number of these immaculately conceived and engineered houses was actually sold" was not only a great disappointment for them, it was a grave shock to the whole movement for industrially-produced housing.
The facts of the Gropius-Wachsmann case-now fully disclosed with extensive visual documentation-are instructive in themselves. But the real significance of this book lies in its ability to relate the facts to the history of industrialized housing and to the modern architect's confrontation with technological, economic, and social forces.
Gilbert Herbert is Mary Hill Swope Professor of Architecture at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He is also the author of The Synthetic Vision of Walter Gropius and Pioneers of Prefabrication: The British Contribution in the Nineteenth Century.
Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (Penguin Art & Architecture)
by Nikolaus Pevsner
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
Pevsner saw Modernism as a synthesis of three main sources: William Morris and his followers, the work of nineteenth-century engineers, and Art Nouveau. The author considers the role of these sources in the work of early Modernists and looks at such masters of the movement as C.F.A. Voysey and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Britain, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in America, and Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner in Vienna. The account concludes with a discussion of the radical break with the past represented by the design work of Walter Gropius and his future Bauhaus colleagues.
Nikolaus Pevsner’s study of the history of modern design, first published in 1936, is a classic text that offers an unrivalled account of the roots of Modernism. This new edition offers beautiful new illustrations, biographies of all major figures, a critique of Pevsner’s analysis from today’s perspective, and much more.
