Walter Gropius was a German architect and educator, best known as the founder of the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. Born in Berlin in 1883, he became one of the leading figures of the Modern Movement, championing the idea that art, craft and industrial production should be brought together to create well-designed objects and buildings for everyday life.
Before the First World War he designed the Fagus factory with Adolf Meyer, an early landmark of glass curtain-wall construction. He established the Bauhaus at Weimar in 1919 and later moved it to Dessau, where he designed its celebrated school building. Gropius left Germany in the 1930s, spending a short period in England, where he worked with the architect Maxwell Fry and was associated with the Isokon company, before moving to the United States to teach at Harvard. His influence on twentieth-century furniture is felt chiefly through the Bauhaus workshops and colleagues such as Marcel Breuer, whose tubular steel designs grew from that environment. For collectors, Bauhaus-period furniture, lighting and graphic material associated with his circle is studied closely for provenance, as later reproductions are common.
