Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus, and Functional Architecture

Germany's Industrial and Cultural Context

Germany's high culture of the late medieval period was followed by a slow decline. In the seventeenth century, the Thirty Years' War wrecked its material and political potential for more than a century. In the late eighteenth century, during a period of political insignificance, classic German literature was produced in the small princely courts. In the early nineteenth century, a thin layer of highly cultivated individuals began to produce Romantic poetry and music at a time when Germany as a whole was pervaded by a depressing political reaction, which expressed itself in bitter opposition to economic freedom and to the development of commerce and industry.

In contrast to the rest of Europe, the period in Germany between 1816 and 1843 — which saw the flowering of its Romantic music and literature — also witnessed an ever-increasing proportion of the population engaged in handicrafts. Not only this, but the number of employers increased relative to employees: a clear indication of a growing number of smaller businesses. The expanding population was finding its outlet in cottage industry rather than factory employment. This situation only began to alter in 1860. Even as late as 1876, the textile industry of the Zollverein — the customs union linking the German states — had only some 219,000 spindles, compared with 600,000 in France and 1,781,000 in Great Britain. The position was similar in other fields, including shipbuilding and railways.

The victory of 1870 precipitated a flood of industrialization: Germany changed almost overnight into a highly industrialized country and within a few decades rivaled France and even England. A new period of prosperity was ushered in, such as Germany had not known since the heyday of its late medieval cities. This was the period of Walter Gropius's youth.

Walter Gropius and the Rise of the Bauhaus

Walter Gropius was a German-American architect and one of the leaders of modern functional architecture. He came from a family of state officials, and nothing stood in the way of a successful start in life. When only 28 years old, he was able to build the Fagus factory — a coup de génie of the new architectural movement. His Fagus factory buildings (1910–11) at Alfeld, with their glass walls, metal spandrels, and discerning use of purely industrial features, were among the most advanced works in Europe.

After World War I, Gropius became director (1918) of the Weimar School of Art, reorganizing it as the Bauhaus. The school was moved in 1925 to Dessau. The complete set of new buildings that Gropius designed for it (1926) remains one of his finest achievements. He also built the Staatstheater at Jena (1923) and experimental houses at Stuttgart (1927), and designed residences, workers' dwellings, and industrial buildings throughout his career.

Driven out by the Nazis, Gropius practiced (1934–37) in London with Maxwell Fry and in 1937 immigrated to America, where he headed the school of architecture at Harvard until 1952. His influence on the dissemination of functional architectural theory and the rise of the International Style was immense. Practicing his principles of cooperative design, Gropius worked with a group of young architects on the design of the Harvard Graduate Center. He continued his architectural activity with this group — The Architects Collaborative (TAC) — in works such as the U.S. Embassy at Athens, the University of Baghdad (1961), and the Grand Central City building in New York City (1963). His writings include The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (tr. 1935) and Scope of World Architecture (1955).

The sentimental genre scenes and derivative neoclassical artistic production of the nineteenth century were replaced in the twentieth century by a fresher, more vital sensibility. The Bauhaus, led by Walter Gropius, became the chief breeding ground of functionalism and encouraged experimentation and abstraction, with the ideal of combining artistic beauty with usefulness. The Nazi regime, however, regarded abstract and expressionist works as degenerate, discouraged and destroyed all but heroic propagandistic art, and the Germany of the 1930s and early 1940s produced nothing of artistic significance. The Bauhaus aesthetic was taught and practiced in the United States by European expatriates and their disciples, while German architecture — massive and dull — glorified the Nazi style.

The Bauhaus's Influence on Architecture and Design Education

Functionality and the use of appropriate materials, as preached by Bauhaus architects (whose aim was to unite all the visual arts under the leadership of architecture), also left its mark on Austrian architecture. Construction was taking place principally in the housing and community sectors. Municipal building projects in the city of Vienna were particularly significant in the years leading up to 1934. At first, most of the architects involved in these projects were municipal employees, but after the introduction of a housing tax in 1923, practically all of Vienna's freelance architects were called upon to present designs. The projects included large housing complexes such as the "Reumannhof," "Washingtonhof," "Karl-Marx-Hof," "Engelsplatz," "Karl-Seitz-Hof," and many others.

Teaching at the Bauhaus was a radical departure from existing art-school training, stressing the intimate link between architecture and such crafts as stained glass, mural decoration, metalwork, carpentry, weaving, pottery, typography, and graphics. Gropius initiated a return to first principles in every form and thereby attempted to end the nineteenth-century split between "art" and "craft." The ideas of the school were subsequently incorporated into teaching programs in Europe and the United States, where many of its teachers and students emigrated. Gropius and Marcel Breuer worked together in the United States from 1937 to 1940, and the International Style — of which Gropius's Bauhaus building of 1925–26 is a hallmark — spread worldwide from there. Other artists associated with the Bauhaus include László Moholy-Nagy and Lyonel Feininger.

The Bauhaus school taught three principal styles of artistic and architectural production.

Prefabrication in architectural construction is a technique whereby large units of a building are produced in factories to be assembled, ready-made, on the building site. The technique permits the speedy erection of very large structures and has been applied to urban housing for more than a century.

Conclusion: Legacy of Gropius and the Bauhaus

In general, artists have long neglected the aesthetic context of organizational behavior. Job performance and satisfaction are influenced by aesthetic factors, as Gropius suggested as early as 1911. The influence of his social environment and family background cannot be disregarded. This is reflected in the character of his work and also in the openness of personality that contributed greatly to his work and its significance.