Everybody's Baby

Speaking in New Orleans in 1959, Architect Walter Gropius, then 76, sadly noted: "I have been 'nobody's baby' during just those years of middle life which normally bring a man to the apex of his career, when seed sown earlier should have come to fruition." True enough, the man who in 1919 founded the Bauhaus, and who later transformed Harvard's Graduate School of Design into one of the finest architectural schools in the U.S., had been asked to build comparatively little. But for once in his life, Walter Gropius turned out to be a poor prophet.

Last week contractors all over the world were preparing bids for the $80 million Baghdad University designed by Gropius and his partners in The Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, Mass. For West Berlin, T.A.C. had plans for a huge housing project (40,880 people) with shopping center and school. In Boston there will be the T.A.C.-designed $25 million Federal Building. In Athens 300 U.S. embassy staffmen were settling into their new columned building on Vassilissis Sofi-as Street. All in all, it seemed as if Walter Gropius had become "everybody's baby."

The embassy is in itself a triumph of architectural diplomacy--a subtle blending of Bauhaus-style innovation with local tradition. It is three stories high, the top two of which are supported by columns at the center and suspended from roof girders at the outside. The visible columns are sheathed in the same Pentelic marble used on the Parthenon, and in time they will take on the Parthenon's golden tint. A blue ceramic screen en closes the ground floor, and the whole structure is built around a square inner courtyard much as were the houses of ancient Athens, thus combining dignity and friendliness, classic elegance and a certain modern informality.

There is about Gropius himself a certain serenity these days. "My reputation," he says with frankness but not vanity, "has penetrated through. Now these things come to me." Next month the city of Frankfurt will award him its coveted Goethe Prize, which it has given to Thomas Mann, Albert Schweitzer and Sigmund Freud. Next fall the Duke of Edinburgh will present Gropius with the gold medal of Britain's Royal Society of Arts. Will Gropius have time next month to attend the formal opening of the embassy in Athens? "No. I don't think I can make it. I'm too busy," says the old architect with just the trace of a smile.

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