Walter Gropius (1883–1969) was a German-American architect, founder of the Bauhaus and one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. Born in Berlin, he studied in Munich and Berlin and in 1908 joined the office of Peter Behrens before setting up his own practice with Adolf Meyer in 1910. In 1919 he became head of the school in Weimar that he turned into the Bauhaus, leading it until 1928. He left Germany for England in 1934 and the United States in 1937, where he taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and won the AIA Gold Medal in 1959.
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The Fagus Factory in Alfeld (1911), whose façade he designed with Meyer, was one of the first modernist buildings, with glass curtain walls. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau he designed its new home, Bauhaus Dessau (1926), whose workshop wing is wrapped in glass. In America his own Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts (1938) helped bring modernism to the country, and the MetLife Building in New York (1963), designed with Pietro Belluschi as the Pan Am Building, was among his last large works.
