Efeméride Walter Gropius

Pois, já não é dia 18, portanto é uma efeméride com moratória, nasceu no dia 18 de maio de 1883, o Arquiteto alemão Walter Gropius. Gropius acreditava que todo o desenho deveria ser funcional e esteticamente agradável, as suas teorias do binómio Forma/Função tornaram-se na bases da fundação da Bauhaus, que transformou a Arquitetura do sec: XX.

Walter Gropius was a German architect and art educator who founded the Bauhaus, which became a dominant force in architecture and the applied arts in the 20th century. His main theory was that all design should be functional as well as aesthetically-pleasing.

The Bauhaus school of design attracted artists in many disciplines, including painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz and expressionist art groups such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter. The school pioneered a functional, severely simple architectural style, featuring the elimination of surface decoration and extensive use of glass. Gropius resigned as the school's director in 1928 to return to private practice. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe followed as the next director.

Although Gropius is best known for the Bauhaus style, his architectural reputation was first established when, working with Adolph Meyer, he designed the Fagus Works (1910-1911) and the office building for the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne (1914).

Opposed to the Nazi regime, Gropius left Germany secretly in 1934. After several years in England, he joined the architecture faculty of Harvard University where he introduced Bauhaus concepts and design principles, including teamwork, standardization and prefabrication, to a generation of American architects.

Between 1938 to 1941, Gropius worked on a series of houses with Marcel Breuer before forming the Architects Collaborative in 1945. Among their commissions were the Harvard Graduate Center (1946), the U.S. Embassy in Athens and the University of Baghdad. One of his later designs, in collaboration with Pietro Belluschi, was the Pam Am Building (now the Metropolitan Life Building) in New York City.

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