Retrospect in Boston

No one has had a more pervasive influence on modern design than Walter Gropius. An architect with surprisingly few buildings to show for his 69 years, Gropius has devoted himself mainly to teaching. He headed Germany's Bauhaus ("Building House") from 1919 to 1928, made the school a seedbed of new designs. Since 1938 he has directed Harvard University's department of architecture, graduated hundreds of dedicated moderns.

Last week Boston honored Gropius with a big retrospective show of his architecture. Included were models of his glass-walled Bauhaus (done in 1926) and Harvard's new graduate center (designed by Gropius and several collaborators). The crisp, cold, unornamental lines of his buildings, their rectilinear counterpointing of wide-eyed windows and bare, blind walls, shocked nobody. Gropius has disseminated his philosophy of design so well that now it is almost taken for granted.

A Notion from Nature. The Gropius philosophy embraces pictures as well as walls, furniture as well as floor plans, iceboxes as well as kitchens. It is based on two ideas, one practical and the other esthetic. The practical idea was not at all obvious when Gropius first acted on it. Modern designers, he reasoned, should get workshop training and should be made familiar with the materials and the machines used in mass production, and their designs should be geared to make use of those materials and machines. Gropius' esthetic notion was deceptively simple. Recognizing that the beauties of nature's creation are part and parcel of their functions, he argued that man's creations too should combine usefulness with beauty.

At the Bauhaus, Gropius gathered a brilliant group of teachers and students to apply his ideas. Marcel Breuer invented the first tubular steel chair. Bogler and Lindig designed pottery for mass production. Josef Albers turned broken bottles into stained-glass windows, and his wife Anni developed new techniques and textures for fabric weaving. Bayer and Moholy-Nagy experimented with typography and abstract photography, Oskar Schlemmer and Xanti Schawinsky produced abstract stage sets. Painters Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Lyonel Feininger stuck mainly to painting.

Sad Eye for the Street. Gropius believes that "the result from a well-oiled team is greater than the sum of their ideas." The Bauhaus proved him right, for the work produced there in the '20s still sets standards for functional elegance in industrial design. He has established no such all-star team at Harvard, but in 13 years Gropius has made it the nation's No. 1 architectural school.

Much remains for his graduates to accomplish, Gropius says. In the U.S., "you go along a big street that is lined for miles & miles with filling stations and restaurants that have absolutely no relationship to the setting, a hodgepodge of ugliness ... Or some suburban developer comes along, cutting down the trees, bulldozing the site and befouling our habitat." A purist with a sad, cold eye, Gropius believes that the main reason for the architectural ugliness he finds everywhere is "inertia of the heart. Man still clings to some visible reminder of Grandpa."

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