Me and Gropius

It is highly offensive that the only example of Walter Gropius' architectural design in the state of Illinois is in danger of being razed in the name of Progress. The former site of the Michael Reese Hospital on Chicago's South Side occupies the proposed ground zero for the 2016 Olympic Village. How have we come to this?

Chicago has always led the country in efforts to preserve and promote its architectural heritage. That's why it is particularly shocking that the Michael Reese Hospital campus is targeted for redevelopment. The Reese campus was an early example of urban planning and redevelopment whose historical importance cannot be overstated. As of this writing, 8 structures within the campus confines have been identified as having substantial Gropius involvement, with the wide variety of input that his work in North America via The Architects Collaborative is noted. The variety of designs on the Reese campus stands in stark contrast to the rigid purity of Mies's Illinois Institute of Technology Campus, a few block west on 31st Street.

For more information, please visit the Gropius in Chicago Coalition .

The seemingly inevitable fate of the Reese Campus depresses me because of what it says about us and our strained relationship to our shared history. To a certain demographic whose cultural knowledge is tied to ability to use keyword searches, Bauhaus is first and foremost a proto-goth band, and maybe a style of quasi-modern furniture embodied by a squared black leather sofa.

My central thesis as a bookseller is that American culture was forever changed by the immigrants who fled Europe before World War II. All aspects of American culture dear to me -- art, architecture, design, advertising, photography, film -- benefitted from the influx of the European Avant-Garde. And Walter Gropius was the alpha male of this pack. I have a special relationship with the work and legacy of Walter Gropius. He gave my life direction and purpose without the privilege of attending the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

In the summer of 2000 I suffered an overload of influence and unfulfilled ambitions. My career as a Graphic Designer was stalled. My interests centered around antique furniture, motorcycles and book collecting -- an odd smorgasbord of vintage paperbacks, top-shelf crime fiction, Beat Generation literature, PhotoBooks and other miscellanea. It all tasted good but left me hungry. I needed focus. I needed a fresh start. I needed to start from zero. I needed a vacation.

Molly and I travelled to Boston in the Summer of 2000, returning to the city where we had lived for a short time in the early nineties. Our goal was to explore the area culture that somehow always gets avoided when you're a city dweller whose life is dominated by the competition for services. That's how we eventually ended up in the colonial village of Lincoln, a mere stone's throw from Walden Pond, at 68 Baker Bridge Road -- the homestead of Walter and Ise Gropius, a National Historic Landmark administered by the Society for Preservation of New England Antiquities.

Gropius: the name quickens the pulse of even the most jaded modernist. Gropius: the Silver Prince himself. Gropius: Mister Alma Mahler. Gropius: founding director of the Bauhaus -- the German crucible of modernism. Gropius: the visionary architect who emigrated to Massachusetts' sheltering shores 317 years after the first group of pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The Silver Prince's modern, flat-roofed castle -- a beautiful International Style residence -- glistened on the hill. I had no idea what awaited me up that gravel driveway. This was a very big deal for me. But I didn't realize it at the time.



The Gropius House is open to the public and administered through the Society for Preservation of New England Antiquities. Six years after her husband's death in 1969, Ise Gropius offered to donate the house to SPNEA , complete with original Bauhaus furniture and original works of art. "Fortunately, SPNEA chose to disregard the fact that the Gropius House marked a conscious rejection of history in terms of emulation of past styles and was a declaration of a new aesthetic and a brave new world," wrote New York Times architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable in 1984.

Thanks to SPNEA's foresight, visitors can explore the house and grounds, view a modern art collection worthy of a major museum (and an unsurpassed collection of original Bauhaus workshop furniture), and experience the residential environment of one of our greatest architects, circa 1965. Quite a bargain for ten dollars.

Our tour group gathered around the free-standing International Style garage that SPNEA had carefully converted into a visitors center. The architecturally renovated garage was suitably austere, displaying a sparse, tasteful selection of books and postcards. No t-shirts, ashtrays or other tourist detritus cluttered the clean, well-lighted space.

Our tour group consisted of Molly and me; a quiet, middle-aged Oriental couple; and a group of young architecture groupies. These young turks are easily as rabid as their rock-n-roll brethren, both subscribing to rigidly defined dress codes. Instead of tight jeans and halter tops, architecture groupies sport khakis, crisp buttoned-down Oxfords, topsiders, and eclectic black plastic eyewear to signify their fealty to the European god Corbu. Susan the tour guide cheerfully announced the tour's beginning, promptly at 11 am.

Gropius had founded the Bauhaus in 1919 to reconcile the disparity between the craftsman tradition and machine age mass-production. "Art and Technology -- a new unity!" was his rallying cry as Gropius gathered the cream of the European Avant Garde to his cause -- visionaries with names like Wassily, Oskar, Laszlo and Farkas.

The Bauhaus was a state school funded by the German government, and its ascendency closely paralleled the rise of National Socialism. Hitler's censure of modernism contributed to the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933. Soon thereafter, Gropius became one of the estimated 60,000 artists who fled Germany.

Susan briefed us on Gropius' background as we tramped up the driveway towards the house. Along the way, she peppered her speech with anecdotes relating to the property, such as why the garage is situated so far away from the house.

During the design process, Mrs. James Storrow had advised Gropius to build his garage down by the road, so he would only have to shovel out a footpath to the garage during heavy snows. Gropius wisely heeded her advice, since Mrs. Storrow was more than a well-wishing neighbor offering helpful rural insights. She actually financed the construction of the house and donated a parcel of land to the Gropius family. More on Mrs. Storrow in a moment.

After leaving Berlin in 1933, Gropius settled his family in London. The next three years took their financial toll as the English steadfastly refused to jump on the modern bandwagon. With commissions few and far between, Gropius put out feelers for opportunities in America, the country widely perceived by European expatriates as the final frontier. Those inquiries sent shock waves through America's ivy towers in 1936.



Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: WALTER GROPIUS FAREWELL DINNER MENU COVER. London: March 9th, 1937 [printed in three-color offset by Lund Humphries on Flake White Parchment].

By the mid-thirties, Harvard Architecture Dean Joseph Hudnutt found himself painted into an academic corner. Harvard, like almost every other American college, was being strangled by the musty Beaux-Arts tradition. The forward-thinking Hudnutt had seen the writing on the walls, and read the journals proclaiming the dawn of a new age in the European architectural tradition -- modernism -- as represented by Gropius' idea of "starting from zero."

Any school that clung to the Beaux-Arts tradition would find itself bypassed, as the best and brightest chose to study with the European masters then amassing on the far shores of the Atlantic, gingerly testing the waters before emigrating to the United States. If American architecture students were going to start from zero, Hudnutt wanted them to do it in Cambridge instead of New Haven. Hudnutt got his superstar when Gropius accepted the offer to become Harvard's director of Architectural Graduate Studies; Gropius got a pulpit from which to preach his modern sermons; and American architectural studies got a long-delayed boot in its ass.

Gropius arrived in the United States eager to promote the modern ideology incubated and formalized at the Bauhaus. Never one to miss a chance to issue a manifesto, he decided his first American statement would be a house -- a house to shelter his family and present his International Styling to the backward-looking tribes of New England.

Unfortunately, three years in London had left him nearly destitute. Nonetheless, Gropius modified some of his existing blueprints and -- with hat in hand -- went to visit loan officers for the Federal Housing Administration.

Word immediately spread through the drawing rooms of Back Bay that the FHA had not been the least bit impressed with the dapper, precise little German and his plans to build -- of all things -- a flat-roofed house! While Boston shared the same latitude as Rome, the fierce New England winters dissuaded further comparisons. Without FHA financing, Gropius found himself in a predicament. Enter Mrs. James J. Storrow.

Eager to help his renowned peer, Boston architect Henry Shepley brought the German's plight to Storrow's attention. A prominent civic leader and arts patron from the upscale suburban village of Lincoln, Storrow had the means to help Gropius. She believed the emigrant's modern notions of building should be given a chance to succeed or fail on their own merits. Mrs. Storrow made Gropius a historically significant offer: she would underwrite $18,000 for construction of a modern house on a four-acre parcel of her Lincoln estate. Upon completion, Gropius would rent the house from her. Gropius eventually bought the land and house from the Storrow family after her death. Our tour group silently acknowledged Mrs. Storrow's munificence while we gathered under the angular, jutting entranceway to the house. Susan distributed protective shoe covers before we entered.

As we donned the white cotton shoe covers, I admired the simple choice of building materials in front of me. Philip Johnson's appropriately titled Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Mies Van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in Illinois, are both fun to visit but you wouldn't want to live in either of them. The Gropius house is a lot of things, but soulless isn’t one of them.

Gropius proclaimed his house would "fulfill regional conditions rather than international precepts." To accomplish this lofty goal, the Gropius family travelled the New England countryside, acquainting themselves with the regional vernacular architecture. The numerous white clapboard barns that contrasted with the thick woodlands of central Massachusetts impressed Gropius. He also admired the handicraft of New England carpenters and their mastery of balloon-frame construction. He noted readily available fieldstones had provided perfect foundations for New England homes for centuries. Gropius decided to incorporate regional building idioms and materials into his house, eventually choosing white painted wood, balloon framing, brick chimney, screened porch, fieldstone foundation and retaining walls. He even chose white clapboard to sheathe his house but placed the boards vertically for a definitive modern statement.

These materials looked warm and inviting. I placed my hands on the vertical white clapboards as our group entered the house single-file through the front door. Susan noted my tactile urges and reminded us that no touching was allowed inside.

The House is quite intimately scaled. Had Gropius been an early acolyte of the smaller-is-better school of thinking? Apparently not: he needed space for a home office, servants’ quarters, multiple bed and bathrooms -- all within Mrs. Storrow's budget, which was generous, yet hardly extravagant for a 2,300-square-foot house.

A vocal advocate of mass-production, Gropius put Mrs. Storrow's money where his mouth was: he specified all building materials from domestic supply houses and catalogues. The house was designed with all four bathrooms and the kitchen serviced by a central plumbing core. Sensing a publicity windfall, the General Electric Corporation donated an electric dishwasher and garbage disposal, both novel kitchen devices in 1937.



Ise Gropius remembered being thankful for the labor-saving devices: "When the maids walked into the highly paid munitions factory jobs in 1941, I was one of the few housewives well-equipped to cope with the new situation."

The intimate scale assisted Gropius' desire to showcase the collection of original Bauhaus furniture he had brought to American. He enjoyed the luxury of scaling each room to highlight furniture produced in the Bauhaus metal and carpentry workshops in Weimar and Dessau. This is a great trick for folks such as myself who tend to buy furniture for the long term.

Visitors can view original Marcel Breuer designs, from the lightweight tubular steel furniture conceived in the Dessau workshop to his later plywood designs. The furniture glistened with that wonderful patina of age, looking to the uninitiated like thrift-shop bargains, while studied eyes absorbed the subtle details of carefully visible screws and canvas stitching. Needless to say, the architecture groupies were all over the furniture like a pack of wild dogs. This same furniture was classified as "obsolete" by the IRS under inheritance tax laws in 1969. Any first-rate museum would covet this rare collection.

I was so taken by the furniture that I nearly missed a Xanti Schawinsky painting in the entranceway. In addition to house, grounds, and furniture, Ise Gropius also bequeathed her family's modern artwork collection to SPNEA. Guess what kind of collection the director of the Bauhaus could accumulate? Who has two thumbs and an all-star faculty including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Oskar Schlemmer, Herbert Bayer, Johannes Itten, etc? THAT guy!

Torturous restraint was necessary to keep from touching the warm, inviting surfaces that beckoned at every turn while our group moved slowly through the house. Susan acknowledged the tactile urge by encouraging us to wrap ourselves around the curved handrail gracefully winding up the circular staircase. This rail is the sole piece of hardware not factory-specified: a Boston pipe-fitter bent the railing to Gropius' specifications. It provides a unique ergonomic tool for ascending to the second-floor bedrooms and out onto the partially shaded deck with a wall painted light pink -- an unexpected color suggested by Bauhaus compatriot and frequent house guest Lyonel Feininger.

Once on the deck, I looked heavenward to that holy idiom of the International Style, the flat roof. Did it leak? Had snowdrifts ever damaged it? Gropius allowed no unsightly gutters to mar his clean facade, so he devised a drainage pipe that dropped through the house into a dry well. He correctly theorized the house's core temperature would prevent the pipe from ever freezing. After 60-plus Massachusetts winters, it never has.

As our tour concluded, Susan pointed across the way to a similar house designed by Marcel Breuer soon after the Gropius House was built. Apparently, Mrs. Storrow was so satisfied with the Gropius house that she allocated more home spaces from her estate for Harvard professors Breuer, Walter Bognar and James Ford. These houses were publicized by modernist cheerleader and all-around bon vivant George Nelson in 1952 as "part of one of the most interesting collections of modern houses in the country." These Lincoln houses served as ground zero for inspiring multiple generations of architects to expand the precepts of the International Style, adapting them to the postwar American building boom.



After visiting the Gropius House in 1939, Lewis Mumford inscribed the guestbook: "Hail to the most indigenous, the most regional example of the New England home, the New England of a New World!"

Mumford was right about the New World part. Unfortunately. American builders have simplified and vulgarized the modern concepts taught by Gropius and his peers, freely interchanging economy for integrity. These vulgarities now line the major arteries of America and are primarily responsible for the poor reputation that the International Style holds in the minds of most Americans. Remember the Michael Reese Hospital?

But back in 1938 the Gropius House served notice that the precepts of the European modern movement could successfully adapt to New England's social and cultural climate. Accordingly to Ada Louise Huxtable, the Gropius house was "the revolutionary architectural shot heard across the country,"

I echoed that sentiment as we walked back to our car. Molly agreed, but thought it shameful that the Bauhaus is primarily remembered as a style instead of an institution. "Those men honestly believed they could change the world," she said, "Now Bauhaus is used to hawk cheap leather furniture on late-night television." She was right. Gropius would roll over in his grave to hear people refer to the Bauhaus as a Style. I thought it was a style all right -- a lifestyle. Art and Technology -- a New Unity; those words stayed with me.

The Oriental couple's car was parked next to ours, and the husband shyly asked if I would take a picture of him and his wife in front of the house. I snapped the picture while the architectural groupies tramped around the grounds, viewing the house from every conceivable angle. I returned their camera, and asked them what they thought of the tour. They both smiled. He said "Gropius belongs to the whole world." I couldn't have said it better myself.

The Gropius House packaged the whole wide world into a neat little box. An American box -- nestled in the New England countryside!

On the drive back into Boston, the dominoes of my life started falling into place, a cascading clatter alongside us on the Cambridge Pike. All of my previously disparate interests started to connect and intertwine: Danny Lyon was practicing the New Vision on his own terms; the Beat authors also; even the hard-boiled Fawcett Gold Medal stable were starting from zero. I had a vision of Charles Willeford smoking a cigar and playing ping-pong with Gropius on the screened-in back porch, with Ise vainly trying to catch the falling ashes in a tiny ceramic ashtray.

By the time we reached Cambridge, Molly had christened me "the Bauhaus Cowboy." I smiled at that. The corral gate was swinging open. I thought of William Holden's Pike Bishop growling, "Let's go." We would ride at dawn.