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Walter Adolph Gropius ( May 18 , 1883 – July 5 , 1969 ) was a German Architect and founder of Bauhaus . HISTORY Born in Berlin , Walter Gropius was the third son of a building advisor to the government with the same name, and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber (1855–1933) whose family owned a manor near the capital city. Gropius married Alma Mahler , the widow of Gustav Mahler . Walter and Alma's daughter, named Manon after his mother, was born in 1916. When Manon died of polio at age eighteen, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her (it is inscribed "to the memory of an angel"). Gropius' marriage to Alma did not last. (Alma went on to marry again, to Franz Werfel ). Gropius, like his father and great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, was an architect. But all sources agree that Walter Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters all through his career. In school he hired an assistant to complete his homework for him. From 1914 through 1925 this task fell to Adolf Meyer , Gropius's office manager then partner, who shares the credit for the seminal work created during this period, including the Fagus Factory and the Bauhaus headquarters at Dessau. He designed buildings using modern materials like concrete on steel-frame construction and glass brick. His works are often compared to abstract paintings. In 1919 he founded the Bauhaus, a school of design where students were taught to use modern and innovative materials and mass-produced fittings, often originally intended for industrial settings, to create original furniture and buildings. In 1923, Gropius designed one of his most famous works, door handles, now considered an icon of 20th Century design and often listed as one of the most influential designs to emerge from the Bauhaus. Gropius fled Germany in 1934 due to the rising power of the Nazi Party, and lived and worked in Britain , at the Isokon project, and then, from 1937 to the United States, where his own house, the Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, was influential in bringing International Modernism to the US. Gropius did not like the term: "I made it a point to absorb into my own conception those features of the New England architectural tradition that I found still alive and adequate" (see {Link without Title} ). Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé Marcel Breuer both came to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School Of Design and collaborate on the company-town Aluminum City Terrace project in New Kensington , Pennsylvania, before their professional split. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1945, Gropius founded The Architects' Collaborative (TAC) based in Cambridge with a group of younger architects. The original partners included Norman C. Fletcher , Jean B. Fletcher , John C. Harkness , Sarah P. Harkness , Robert S. MacMillan , Louis A. MacMillen, and Benjamin C. Thompson . TAC would become one of the most well-known and respected architectural firms in the world. TAC went bankrupt in 1995. Gropius died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts , aged 86. Today, he is remembered not only by his various buildings but also by the district of Gropiusstadt in Berlin. IMPORTANT BUILDINGS
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TRIVIA Gropius was known to have a snappy sense of style and was often seen wearing a bowtie. Among his students was the writer and theorist Sigfried Giedion . Walter Gropius and his wife Alma are mentioned in Tom Lehrer's song "Alma." EXTERNAL LINKS
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