Architecture ¡ Modernist
1883â1969 ¡ German-American
Bauhaus; the International Style
Founder and first director of the Bauhaus, the German school that fused fine art, craft and industrial design and became the most influential art school of the twentieth century. Gropius's own buildings â the Fagus factory, the Bauhaus at Dessau â established the glass curtain wall and the asymmetrical pinwheel plan as modern orthodoxy. Driven out by the Nazis, he taught at Harvard and turned American architectural education towards modernism.
A shoe-last factory at Alfeld of 1913, its corners turned in glass with the brick piers set back â often called the first modern building (1911â1913)
Alfeld, Lower Saxony, Germany
The Fagus Factory, with Adolf Meyer; a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2011
A 1926 school building whose vertically lettered glazed wall and bridge over a road became the emblem of a whole movement (1926)
Dessau, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
The Bauhaus building at Dessau, designed by its own director for the school he founded
A small white clapboard-and-glass-block house of 1938 in Massachusetts, built by a refugee to show New England what modernism looked like (1938)
Lincoln, Massachusetts
The Gropius House, now run by Historic New England
A 59-storey slab of 1963 set across the axis of Park Avenue behind Grand Central Terminal, once the largest office building in the world by floor area (1963)
200 Park Avenue, New York City
The Pan Am Building, with Pietro Belluschi and Emery Roth & Sons; renamed the MetLife Building in 1981
A group of low dormitories and a commons of 1950 that brought European modernism onto an Ivy League campus (1950)
Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Harvard Graduate Center, the first commission of The Architects Collaborative