Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius was a German architect who founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 and led it as director until 1928, before the school later closed under Nazi pressure in 1933 under its final director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Gropius trained in the Berlin office of the architect Peter Behrens, whose staff in the years before the First World War also included Mies and, briefly, Le Corbusier, a shared apprenticeship art historians treat as one root of twentieth-century architectural Modernism. After emigrating from Germany, Gropius taught at Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1937, where he trained a generation of American architects in Bauhaus-descended Modernist principles.