Gropius the Romantic

* I am grateful to many people and institutions for information and rerences, but especially to Professor Fred Forbat of Vallingby. Dr. Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus, director of the Karl-Ernst-Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, and Hans Maria Wingler, director of the Bauhaus-Archiv in Darmstadt, very kindly put the material in their institutions at my disposal.

Abstract

In his later years Walter Gropius repeatedly disassociated himself from the emphatic proclamations he had published in the spring of 1919 in the pamphlet for the Berlin Exhibition for Unknown Architects and in the first Bauhaus manifesto. In his eighties he explained his two hymn-like utterances at the age of thirty-five as a merely tactical precaution. “Anatter-of-fact appeal for matter-of-fact work,” wrote Gropius, “would at that time have failed in its purpose, namely, to offer young people full of new ideas a broad basis on which those ideas could be clarified and tested practically.”¹ To be sure, students of the Bauhaus and of Walter Gropius's works have not accepted this explanation by the founder of he Bauhaus. Nevertheless, the extent to which Gropius belnged to the Expressionist movement after World War I was not been made clear even by writers who have devoted themselves to the study of Expressionism in architecture.² The articles, lectures, notes and letters written by Gropius at that time have not been taken into account; nor have the buildings designed in the Weimar office of Gropius and Adolf Meyer in the years just after 1918 been published. The two exceptions are the Weimar Monument to the Fallen of the March Insurrection and the Sommerfeld House, which have been looked upon as strange episodes but not as characteristic examples of this phase of the architect's creative work.