MyArchitects – Walter Gropius
For much of my collegiate career, Walter Gropius was a paragon of the architectural ideal. For me, he represented a blurring of the edges between architect, designer, teacher and philosopher that I personally found so immensely intriguing with the profession. As the catalyst behind the Bauhaus school, and certainly one of the fathers who gave birth to the morphology of modernism, Gropius’ work personifies everything that is elegant about contemporary design.
While I had seen many of his works during and after the war, is wasn’t until I was introduced to his 1922 submission for the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition that whole new worlds opened for me. His entry, at a time less than a handful of years removed from the First World War, severed this association with the past (much as the war hearkened the end of the old world) not only incorporated his modern elegance, but suggesting a level of futuristic advancement few others, I believe, had begun to consider. Read the rest of this entry →