Walter Gropius

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German-American architect, father of the Bauhaus movement. After graduation in 1907 from a German Technical University Architecture Department, he took an educational tour to Spain and then became in Assistant to Peter Behrens. In 1910 he had a private practice in Berlin. He fought for Germany in the First World War and in 1915, married Alma-Maria Mahler, former wife of composer Gustav Mahler, whom he divorced in 1920. They had a daughter Manon born in 1916. In 1919, he was director of the grand ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts and the grand-ducal Saxon School for the Fine Arts, both of which he unified under the name "State Bauhaus in Weimar." The school was based on the principle that art "should meet the needs of society and that no distinction should be made between fine arts and practical crafts." In 1923, he married Ilse Frank and had the first exhibition of the Weimar Bauhaus. In 1928, he resigned his directorship and resumed private practice in Berlin. He visited the United States for the first time. In 1934, because of the Nazi movement, he and his wife moved to London where he resumed a private practice for three years, along with Maxwell Fry. In 1937 he was made Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA and he and his wife moved to the US. He maintained a private practice with Marcel Breuer from 1938-1941. In addition, in 1938 he was made Chairman of Harvard's Department of Architecture, a post he held until 1952. In 1946 he co-founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC) in Cambridge, MA, a firm which he headed until his death on 5 July 1969 in Boston, MA. He was awarded the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1956, the Grand Cross and Star of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1958, and the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1959. Link to Wikipedia biography