Artist Ten: Walter Gropius

German architect, Walter Gropius, was born in Berlin in 1883.  Although a great architect, he could not draw and relied on a team to help him create his works.  In 1908 Gropius was hired at the firm of Peter Behrens, but in 1910 he, with his coworker, Adolf Meyer, left Behrens firm and created their own practice in Berlin.  World War I paused Gropius’s career, he served as a sergeant major and was almost killed.  After the war Gropius was appointed as the master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar in 1919.  It was this school that Water Gropius transformed into the Bauhaus.  Many of the designs he created while at Bauhaus are seen as some of the most influential and iconic.  In 1934 Gropius was able to leave Nazi Germany, and then in 1937 he came to the United States.  His personal house in Massachusetts is seen as the image that brought international modernism to the United States.  He then went on to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and in 1944 he became a citizen on the United States.  A year later he founded The Architects’ Collaborative, it became one of the most well-known architectural firms in the world, but went bankrupt in 1995.