Why Asymmetrical Architecture Is So Disturbing May 22, 2008
All exemplary Modernist buildings celebrated asymmetry: The wings of Walter Gropius' Bauhaus shoot off in different directions; the columns of Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion are symmetrical, but you can hardly tell, thanks to the randomly spaced walls; nothing in Frank Lloyd Wright's pinwheeling Fallingwater mirrors anything else; and Le Corbusier's Ronchamps dispenses with traditional church geometry altogether. The facades of Philip Johnson's Glass House are rare instances of Modernist... (Slate)
Museum embarks on unusual marketing plan Apr 23, 2008
But that decade's culture, Armstrong noted, featured experimental music by Francis Poulenc and Erik Satie, daring modernist architects such as Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, and experimental literature by e.e. cummings. "That's what defined that era," Armstrong said. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PA)
Preserve modernist buildings at UM Apr 5, 2008
The Nazis closed down that progressive Berlin school in 1933 and its leading architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe came to America as exiles. Leading American architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson embraced the movement. (Missoulian, MT)
Bauhaus Furniture Design at Knoll Mar 1, 2008
Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer were working out of offices in Boston, where Florence Schust was apprenticing when she met husband-to-be and business partner Hans Knoll. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he taught and greatly influenced Florence, who later said he d had a profound effect on my design approach and the clarification of design. (Suite101.com)
A clear modern vision Feb 17, 2008
But the word is also the name of a style that flourished in the United States from about 1940 to 1975, beginning with the arrival of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, at Harvard in 1937, where he helped train a generation of modern architects including Johnson, I.M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, and numerous others. New Canaan was a hotbed of early modernism in the 1940s and 1950s, as were Boston suburbs like Lincoln. (Boston Globe)
Tale of a teapot Dec 17, 2007
It has the fetishistic allure not only of having been made inside the Bauhaus, but of belonging to its golden age in the mid-1920s, when the director, Walter Gropius, had fired the mystical Johannes Itten, and hired Moholy to establish the school as a cradle of the modern movement. The MT49 evokes the optimism of that era. (International Herald Tribune)
Shaped into greatness Dec 3, 2007
The building in question was the Bauhaus, the German art and design school designed in the mid-1920s by the architect Walter Gropius in the industrial city of Dessau. On his visit in 1929, Johnson, who grew up to become a famous architect, was equally entranced by the work of the students: so much so that he adopted Bauhaus habits, like typing solely in lower case letters. (International Herald Tribune)
Nakashima: Two new shows celebrate famed modern furniture makers Aug 25, 2007
In the 1930s, Mr. Nakashima spent two weeks as a student at Harvard, where German architect Walter Gropius and his colleague, Marcel Breuer, held sway with their Bauhaus theory of design. Unimpressed, Mr. Nakashima left to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PA)
Chairs sitting pretty as a design icon, but for how long? Aug 12, 2007
During the first half of the 20th century, the most influential writing on design was invariably by architects, notably William Lethaby, Hermann Muthesius, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. Like most architects, if they designed an object, it was typically a piece of furniture, usually a chair. (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
* Brazil's colossus of concrete Aug 5, 2007
"Walter Gropius came to see me at my house at Canoas above Rio. I designed it in a sequence of natural curves to flow in and out of the existing landscape. He said, it's beautiful, but it can't be mass-produced. As if I had intended such a thing! What an idiot.". Today, Niemeyer lives in what he calls "an ordinary apartment" in Copacabana close to his studio. (Taipei Times, Taiwan -- Business)
Norman Fletcher, 89; cofounded influential architects group Jun 6, 2007
The firm's biggest name was Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus art and architecture school in Germany who was teaching at Harvard. Pioneering a collaborative approach to design, the eight partners took equal salaries and met each week to discuss projects, rotating as leader. (Boston Globe)
Architecture at MoMA: Another look May 16, 2007
Essentially, they defined what came to be known as the International Style by featuring the work of European modernists like Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and J.J.P. Oud. In most cases, they selected buildings with radically simplified forms and an utter rejection of ornament. (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
Designed so you'll walk this way May 13, 2007
The first new building on what was to become the Brattle Walk was a headquarters for the architecture firm founded by Walter Gropius. It was finished back in 1968. (Boston Globe)
Things to do today May 13, 2007
HUNTINGTON MUSEUM OF ART: Portfolio 2007 student art exhibit and Joseph A. Smith: Walter Gropius Master Art Exhibit both close today. Hours: noon to 5 p.m. 2033 McCoy Road. (Charleston Gazette, WV -- News)
All in the family May 11, 2007
Modern-minded visitors might prefer the Gropius House, built and inhabited in 1938 by Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus architecture. His house is a white box once called "The Big Marshmallow" by neighbors, but it's a beautiful box, with delightful views of the woods and a delicate Japanese garden. (Boston Globe)
Clay Center gets big donation Apr 6, 2007
The Huntington Museum of Arts Walter Gropius Master Artist three-day workshops, named for the famous architect who designed the museums 1970 addition, has a big reputation and draws artists from several states, she said. In other Clay Center news, income has lagged behind expectations for sponsorships and foundation gifts in the fiscal years first eight months, Chuck Avampato told board members. (Charleston Gazette, WV -- News)
Thoroughly modern Mondrian for Corcoran (Ann Geracimos and Kevin Chaffee) Mar 16, 2007
Upstairs in rooms reconfigured for the show, guests meandered through gallery after gallery admiring works by Fernand Leger, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, among many others. One of the most unusual was the "Frankfurt Kitchen," the first built-in modern kitchen manufactured in mass quantity. (Washington Times, DC)
The Palace of Soviets Feb 17, 2007
The Italian Palace of Soviets: Ancient Rome Meets Stalinist Monument. The winning design that never materialized is a quintessential example of Stalinist monumentality, and the exhibition reveals the project s Italian influence in its gigantism reminiscent of ancient Rome. (Suite101.com)
The Forgotten Pioneer of Corporate Design Jan 30, 2007
Bruce begins his story with Noyes's early years and his education at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where the young architect came under the influence of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, who fled Germany in 1937, bringing the modernist ideals of the Bauhaus School with them. But the author moves quickly to the early years of Noyes's career when, after a brief stint working in the office of his mentors, he became the first curator of design at New York's Museum of Modern Art. (MSNBC -- Business)
* A dilapidated testament to a once-thriving community Jan 28, 2007
Though considered a long shot, campaigners say it is a last hope to raise funds to shore up a century-old site where crumbling headstones sit among mausolea by famed Bauhaus architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. "The unique importance of Weissensee is not only its remarkable artistic treasures but also its inextricable link with the history of Berlin's Jews," said Hermann Simon, director of the Centrum Judaicum foundation for Jewish history and culture. (Taipei Times, Taiwan -- World)
Gropius' Bauhaus in Dessau Sheds Two-Tone Look, Glows in Birthday Colors Dec 5, 2006
The art and architecture school founded by Walter Gropius moved to Dessau from Weimar 80 years ago. The building he designed to house it is celebrating both its birthday and the end of a 10- year renovation with ``Icon of Modernism,'' an exhibition documenting its history and the reconstruction work. (Bloomberg -- Germany)
The Return of Kahn Dec 4, 2006
Harvard had just completed Walter Gropius brick and concrete graduate center in 1950, and Yale was eager to match its forward-thinking northern rival building for building. Yale was also looking for a new gallery, as the Universitys collection had outgrown the available space. (Yale Herald, CT)
Royston T. Daley, 77; architect 'helped reshape' BC campus Nov 17, 2006
Howe said the late modernism evident in Mr. Daley's design for the O'Neill library reflected his years at The Architects Collaborative, which was started by Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus art and architecture school in Germany. By contrast, Howe said, Mr. Daley remodeled the Bapst and Burns libraries by rediscovering the Gothic origins of the buildings, "modernizing and humanizing, bringing it up to date, but respecting the past.". (Boston Globe)
Family gets back looted Munch masterpiece Nov 9, 2006
Alma, one of the most colourful figures of early 20th-century Vienna, who dallied with Gustav Klimt before marrying Mahler, was given the work in 1916 by her second husband, Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus. A gift to commemorate the birth of their child, Manon, the painting became inextricably linked in Alma's mind with the girl's short life: she died of polio aged 18. (Guardian Unlimited -- UK)
Art, architecture meet Nov 4, 2006
The Bauhaus: Radical architect Walter Gropius formed this anti-fine art school, what he called a "guild of craftsmen without class distinction," in 1919 in Weimar, Germany. One of Zittel's models, the Bauhaus aimed to integrate all arts into a coherent and accessible form of expression that would transform society through rational, practical and aesthetic practices. (Buffalo News)
Thinking outside the `Box' of design Oct 22, 2006
" It's an exhibit of the work of the school in its heyday, and that heyday was back in the long-ago 1940s.Then Harvard was famed as the first modernist school of architecture in the United States. It produced the most remarkable generation of architects ever to emerge from an American school.Three leaders of that generation, now aged 83 to 90, came to Cambridge last week. At a symposium, they talked about their hopes and ambitions as young men. They were John Johansen, Ulrich Franzen, and Victor... (Boston Globe)
More the machinations than the monuments Oct 11, 2006
First, in 1954, he got it to invite his old mentor, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, to the Fourth Australian Architectural Convention. Gropius bashed councils, pushed functionalism and posed for photo opportunities at the Rose Seidler House. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Opinion)
A jewel of modern architecture Aug 26, 2006
Some day, if the preservation stars align properly, devotees of design will travel here to tour a seldom-seen triumph of modern architecture -- the largest private mansion ever designed by partners Walter Gropius, founder of the revolutionary German school called the Bauhaus, and Marcel Breuer, an architect and furniture designer. Set atop a secluded, wooded knoll and completed in 1940, the Shadyside home was commissioned by Robert J. Frank, an engineer who reviewed every blueprint, and his... (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PA)
Bauhaus goes to the beach Aug 24, 2006
A Chain of Events: Modern Architecture on the Outer Cape," now up at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, is an attempt to rectify that lack of attention, celebrate some of the innovative housing that was built, and urge preservationists to take on a new cause.Curators Bob Bailey and Peter McMahon have put together a sleek, handsome show that follows the rise and fall of the functional geometries of modernist houses in Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet. Photos in color and... (Boston Globe -- Living)
architectureAssessing Zaha Hadid.Witold Rybczynski Jun 26, 2006
Walter Gropius once said that an architect should be able to design a city or a teacup. Whatever the merits of such a dubious claim, even Gropius wouldn't have suggested that teacups and cities were interchangeable. (Slate)
America's vision of Klee (Deborah K. Dietsch) Jun 17, 2006
Other Klee collectors included film director Billy Wilder, politician Nelson Rockefeller and architect Walter Gropius. About 1,150 works by Klee -- more than 10 percent of his output -- belong to American collections. (Washington Times)
Neutra, in miniature May 25, 2006
But social housing dwellings for the working class in an increasingly crowded industrial society consumed Neutra as much as it did other Modernists such as Walter Gropius, Ernst May and Le Corbusier. "He started thinking about affordable housing as far back as the '20s," says Barbara Lamprecht, the author of "Richard Neutra: Complete Works.". (Los Angeles Times)
Fear Factor: Security in a New Age May 2, 2006
"Embassy design was once all about projecting transparent democracies, and so you had American embassies designed by Walter Gropius in Athens and Edward Durrell Stone in New Delhi that were these very lacy, open things that sat in the heart of cities," he says. "Now embassies are designed to be bunkers in the suburbs a place to stand in line for your visa.". (BusinessWeek)
Recalling a modernist's gifts Apr 23, 2006
Thus it's a delight to see a fine small exhibition of his early work, ''Paul Rudolph: The Florida Houses," now on view in one of Rudolph's own buildings, the Jewett Art Center at Wellesley.The houses were designed in the 1940s and '50s when Rudolph was in his 30s. Most of them were vacation homes on Gulf Coast beaches, done for clients from the North. Anyone interested in architecture can profit from this exhibit. It reminds you how fresh and uncluttered, how taut and alive, the modern movement... (Boston Globe -- Living)
Paradise Now Mar 20, 2006
But that was what Domenech, the star of Catalan modernism, did in his masterpiece, the Palace of Catalan Music, a building almost unimaginably remote from the products and ideas of northern modernist architects and theorists like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who wanted to strip all ornament from buildings and, like Euclid, "look on Beauty bare". Adolf Loos, in Vienna, actually wrote a polemical text entitled Ornament and Crime, in which he set forth the truly demented thesis that the impulse... (Guardian Unlimited)
Harry Seidler, 82; Architect Altered Sydney's Skyline Mar 15, 2006
Then, at Harvard, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius instilled in Seidler an appreciation for the Modernist school of industrial design that strove to connect artists, architects and craftsmen. After honing his skills with mentors Alvar Aalto at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Marcel Breuer in New York, Seidler moved to Australia in 1948 to design a home for his mother and father and establish his practice. (Los Angeles Times)
Mahler's family fights for return of Munch masterpiece Feb 11, 2006
Alma Mahler was an extraordinary figure, who married not only Gustav Mahler, but later the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, and the writer Franz Werfel ... She was given it by her second husband, Walter Gropius, on the birth of their child, Manon. (Guardian Unlimited -- Arts)
Boasting of Bauhaus Jan 9, 2006
This is nice-weather architecture," she said as she gestured at the play of light and shadow on the geometric forms of the Bauhaus Building.I wasn't sure that Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus school of design in 1919 and later served as chairman of Harvard University's architecture department, considered atmospheric conditions when he designed his masterwork. But Scheer, a student in the postgraduate program in urban studies offered by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, made her point. The... (Boston Globe)
James Pulliam, 80; Architect, Teacher Noted for Modernism Jan 1, 2006
After being introduced to the work of Walter Gropius, a major figure in modern architecture who founded the Bauhaus school of design, Pulliam went to Harvard University's graduate school of design because Gropius taught there. Pulliam returned to the Marines during the Korean War before beginning his architectural career in Los Angeles. (Los Angeles Times)
