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Must-Know Modern Homes: Gropius House
Dynamic and sculptural, this New England home refutes a common conception of modern architecture by responding personally to its site
Houzz Contributor. I am an architect and writer living in New York City. I have Bachelor of Architecture and Master in Urban Planning degrees, and over ten years experience in architectural practice, split between Chicago and NYC. Currently I'm focused on writing and online pursuits. My daily blog can be found at http://archidose.blogspot.com
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Along with Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius (1883–1969) is considered one of the masters of modern architecture. His buildings are not as widely known as those of the other three architects, but his role as an educator at the Bauhaus School in Germany, and at Harvard University after immigrating to the United States in 1937, cemented this status.
Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in Weimar in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, penning a manifesto five years later when the school began in earnest. In it he called for people to "desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity."
These words echo the contemporaneous De Stijl manifesto, but the completion of the Bauhaus' new home in 1926 in Dessau is a different direction than buildings like the Rietveld-Schröder House. Considered Gropius' masterpiece, the Bauhaus is an asymmetrical complex with all-glass exterior walls that he described as "adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars" and aligned "with the new audacity of engineering."
But seven years later the Bauhaus closed under pressure from the Nazi regime, and Gropius, working on his own at the time, fled to England. Four years after that he set out for the United States (as did Mies van der Rohe, to Chicago) at the invitation of the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design to direct the Department of Architecture, shifting it from a Beaux-Arts school to one focused on the "new architecture." Close to Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gropius built a house for himself, an expression of his ideals in a foreign land. As we'll see, the house shows how modern architecture, often seen as universalizing, actually responds to particulars of place.
Gropius House at a Glance
Year built: 1938
Architect: Walter Gropius
Location: Lincoln, Massachusetts
Visiting info: Self-guided tours available
Size: 2,300 square feet
More: 10 Must-Know Modern Homes
Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in Weimar in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, penning a manifesto five years later when the school began in earnest. In it he called for people to "desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity."
These words echo the contemporaneous De Stijl manifesto, but the completion of the Bauhaus' new home in 1926 in Dessau is a different direction than buildings like the Rietveld-Schröder House. Considered Gropius' masterpiece, the Bauhaus is an asymmetrical complex with all-glass exterior walls that he described as "adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars" and aligned "with the new audacity of engineering."
But seven years later the Bauhaus closed under pressure from the Nazi regime, and Gropius, working on his own at the time, fled to England. Four years after that he set out for the United States (as did Mies van der Rohe, to Chicago) at the invitation of the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design to direct the Department of Architecture, shifting it from a Beaux-Arts school to one focused on the "new architecture." Close to Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gropius built a house for himself, an expression of his ideals in a foreign land. As we'll see, the house shows how modern architecture, often seen as universalizing, actually responds to particulars of place.
Gropius House at a Glance
Year built: 1938
Architect: Walter Gropius
Location: Lincoln, Massachusetts
Visiting info: Self-guided tours available
Size: 2,300 square feet
More: 10 Must-Know Modern Homes
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| Gropius was able to build the home for his family through the generosity of Helen Storrow, a wealthy Boston matron, who offered him the land and a loan. Gropius worked on the house with Marcel Breuer, a colleague from the Bauhaus; the two would work together until the early 1940s. Here we see the north elevation, with the front door below the canopy and behind the glass block wall. A spiral stair leads to a second-floor terrace. |
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| The land that Gropius was provided is near Walden Pond — Historic New England, which now administers the house, gives this direction to it: "Route 126 South past Walden Pond." The immigrant architect supposedly discussed Thoreau in writing about the house in terms beyond physical proximity to the pond. The house is surrounded by an apple orchard and other trees. It takes advantage of this context through large windows and terraces, perhaps a modern interpretation of Thoreau's communing with nature. |
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| Architectural historian Kenneth Frampton describes the house in his analysis: It is "more sculptural than most photographs suggest. ... [It] is a dynamic spatial composition." We've seen the primarily closed north (entry) side of the house; here we see the south side, which invites the sun in through larger windows and is carved for the second-floor terrace. |
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| The west side is anchored by a brick wall that contains the fireplace for the first-floor living room. The house's sculptural qualities are most pronounced in this view, where we see the roof overhang propped upon slender pilotis as well as the trellised terrace and a screened porch on the back of the house. |
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| The approach to the house is via a driveway that comes from the northeast. This angle presents a very International-style appearance of the house's planar white walls, ribbon windows and asymmetry. Yet some vertical lines can be sensed when looking closely at the sunny east facade. Instead of whitewashed concrete block walls — as was the norm with many modern buildings in Europe — Gropius used white vertically lapped siding on a wood balloon frame. (The steel columns in the previous photo show that the structure is a hybrid in parts.) Gropius found inspiration with the traditional building methods and materials of the region, all the while creating something different from the norm. |
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| A canopy reaches out from the north facade at an angle, as if to grab people from the driveway. About halfway up the path to the front door is a glass block, a stark separation from the vernacular materials that Gropius used. A glance around the wall reveals the spiral stair leading to an opening in the exterior wall, what is one of the most intriguing aspects of the design. (A spiral stair on the front of a house? Where does it lead?) |
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| The glass block wall straddles inside and outside, creating some shelter on the outside and bringing some indirect natural light to the interior. |
A few steps inside the entryway and one is confronted with a spiraling stair leading to the second floor. Again, there is something of a balance between old and new happening here. Architect Alexander Gorlin describes how "the plan could be interpreted as a modern version of the typical Colonial, with a central stair hall and the living area to one side, the kitchen on the other, and the bedrooms above." From this view toward the front door, the living room is on the left and the kitchen is behind us and to the right.
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| Off the entry hall is Gropius' study, which looks north through a large window. A door from the study to the front door also leads to the spiral stair outside; this door and the stair are due to the fact that the second-floor access to the terrace is through the children's room. (See the floor plan below.) Opposite the plate glass wall is another glass block wall, separating the study from the dining room and living area. |
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| Here is a view of the dining area from the living room; the two are basically an L-shaped open space wrapping around the study through the glass block wall. The furniture pieces in the dining room are Bauhaus originals designed by Marcel Breuer that Gropius brought from Germany. |
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| Access to the bedroom in the master suite is through the dressing room of Gropius' wife, Ise. (The closet and bathroom are to the left.) This unique and potentially inconvenient situation is remedied by a clear glass wall with an inset mirror separating the two spaces. |
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| Our last view of the house is of the second-floor terrace, looking west; the opening from the spiral stair is just out of frame to the right. Here we can get a better glimpse of the wood siding that covers the house. We can also see a house that Gropius and Breuer designed for Breuer on the same land from Helen Storrow. |
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| Gropius died in 1969, and his wife decided 10 years later to donate the house to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now Historic New England. The Gropius House opened as a museum in 1985, two years after Ise's passing. In 2002 the house was designated a National Historic Landmark. Forty-five years of care by the Gropiuses and periodic restorations by Historic New England mean the house and its original furnishings are in great shape and worth seeing in person. |
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| References
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Ideabook updated on April 5, 2013.
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Always enjoy your work! Thanks for this piece on the Gropius house in particular... You helped me to see it in a little different light than I had in the past. I'd always felt Gropius' work was a little sterile, but had never seen as many images of his residence as I should have.
It's interesting, as well, to see the vastly different directions he and Breuer took; I was always a bit partial to Breuer's more vernacular sensibility. It's fun to see their work in juxtaposition and watch the two threads diverge.
It's also fun to see the influence of Mendelsohn in the stairway of this house (the prior evolutionary step to Gropius), and then follow the images through and observe how many of the ideas in this house played into Neutra's work of only a few years farther forward.
For those interested in further reading, I'd also direct enthusiasts to Edward Ford's "The Details of Modern Architecture, Volume 1". Chapter 10 has a fascinating analysis of the practical aspects of the Gropius home's construction. Gropius' loving embrace of American construction methods and standards was a stunning feat of adaptation on his part.
I'll watch for more of your excellent pieces in the future! Happy to see a fine writer like yourself serve as a voice for Modernism.
Sincerely,
Dave Sanders
Another aspect is the size and placement of windows - sensible regarding the use of the room and at the same time a pleasing arrangement from the outside. No comparison to the ordinary builders' home of today with its plain box-like rear facade with five windows of various sizes and shapes haphazardly scattered about.
I've seen several of the Gropius buildings in Berlin and the ideabook stimulated my desire to visit this modern icon too during one of our future U.S. travels.
Check in advance, as I recall the Gropius house hours were limited and strange. Not at all like open most of the day, most days a week, most weeks of the year.
midmodfan and Sigrid - The house is open year-round, just on certain days depending on the time of year. Here's the current schedule, per the Historic New England website:
Wednesday – Sunday, June 1 - October 15
Saturday and Sunday, October 16 - May 31
11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Tours on the hour. Last tour at 4:00 p.m.
Closed most major holidays.
Thx
Thanks for educating this architectural history beginner. In my next life I want to come back as an architect :)