About Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who, along with Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He is a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar (1919) and was also a leading architect of the International Style.

Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928 and moved to Berlin. However, the rise of Hitler in the 1930s would soon drive Gropius out of Germany. With the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, Gropius was able to leave Nazi Germany in 1934, on the pretext of making a temporary visit to Italy for a film propaganda festival; he then fled to Britain to avoid the fascist powers of Europe. He lived and worked in the artists’ community associated with Herbert Read in Hampstead, London, as part of the Isokon group with Fry and others for three years, before moving on to the United States with his family. As the Director of the Bauhaus, Gropius was one of the most esteemed Isokon tenants and lived in the Lawn Road Flats from 1934 to 1937.