The little-known story about the Argentine residence is an intricate one, complete with political intrigue and abandoned designs.
The Bauhaus mastermind was 85 years old when he agreed to design a new residency for the German ambassador in Buenos Aires. It was one of his last projects and among his best. The only problem — it never got built.
... Gropius' limited drawing skills. That weakness already worried him while working alongside Mies van der Rohe und later Le Corbusier in his first job in the Berlin office of pioneering modernist architect, Peter Behrens.
In a letter to his mother Meldina, which Gropius gave to his biographer Reginald Isaacs, he wrote: "My total inability to draw the simplest thing on paper is very discouraging and I often look with sorrow on my future profession. I cannot draw a straight line."
Perhaps out of necessity, he relied early in his career on collaboration, which he then elevated to an art form. It became the running theme of a man of ideas who didn't always have the means to deliver.
"Everybody wants to think of him as one of the world's great designers, but he wasn't. He was one of the world's great [design] philosophers," Sally Harkness, a co-founding partner at TAC, once commented.
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