Walter Gropius

Lifetime

1883–1969

Country

Germany / USA

Walter Gropius was born on 18 May 1883 in Berlin and died on 5 July 1969 in Boston. He studied architecture in Munich and Berlin, and from 1908 worked in the office of Peter Behrens. Together with Adolf Meyer, he designed the Fagus-Werk factory in Alfeld (1910–1911), with glass curtain walls. In 1919, he transformed the school in Weimar into Bauhaus.

From 1937 to 1952, he taught at Harvard Graduate School of Design, from 1938 as head of the architecture department. From 1945, he was a senior partner at The Architects Collaborative (TAC), which operated until 1995. He received, among others, the AIA Gold Medal (1959), the Albert Medal (1961) and the Goethe Prize (1961). He was a pioneer of modernism and the International Style, with an emphasis on teamwork.

In the field of post-war consumer objects, the TAC 01 service for Rosenthal is significant. Introduced in 1969 and named after the TAC office, it has a hemispherical form and a lid with a bayonet fastening. It belongs to the Rosenthal Studio-Linie range; an anniversary edition was released in 2019.