From Richard Rogers to Habitat and Ikea, the influence of the Bauhaus school is everywhere. So why is its charismatic founder, Walter Gropius, still so widely misunderstood?
Arrogant and charmless, obsessed with his own image, even phoney – this is how Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, the most influential of all art schools, is remembered. He is the rigid disciplinarian, the architect unable to draw. In the five years I’ve spent writing about Gropius’s life, I have often been treated as crazy for taking on such an unsympathetic subject. The architectural historian Joseph Rykwert described Gropius as someone “who seemed to have fewer redeeming features than many of his kind … his pinched humourless egotism was unrelieved by sparkle”. But these received ideas need to be challenged. Why have people got him so wrong?
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Was Walter Gropius anti-women? This is an idea that has recently gained currency and one I would fervently disagree with. Bauhaus recruitment figures show that female students frequently outnumber men. Certainly, of the female staff only Gunta Stölzl became a workshop master. But other women were respected teachers and, within the rigorous yet permissive ethos of the Bauhaus, Gropius created the conditions in which they too could thrive. Marianne Brandt, Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain, Anni Albers: these were star performers. Albers’s recent show at Tate Modern in London came as a revelation to many. She claimed that her Bauhaus training gave her a sense of purpose and direction. Schlemmer’s famous painting Bauhaustreppe, showing crop-haired students crowding up the staircase, gives a wonderful sense of Bauhaus female camaraderie.
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The most damaging of insults hurled at him occur in Tom Wolfe’s savage diatribe From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) in which Gropius is vilified as champion of the high-rise, responsible for the ruination of our cities. In this attack on the most famous architectural modernists, written at the time when postmodernist architecture was in the ascendant, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier came under fire as well. Gropius indeed spoke lucidly about the benefits of multi-storey apartment blocks as a means of solving the problems of overcrowded cities. But he was also a humanist and lover of the natural environment – his views on high-rise buildings were never sternly doctrinaire.
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