Obviously, this logo is to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Walter Gropius’ birth. A photo of the great architect will be posted at the bottom of this page, and the following is some information about him: (courtesy to wikipedia)

Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third son of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber. Gropius married Alma Mahler (1879-1964), widow of Gustav Mahler. Walter and Alma’s daughter, named Manon after Walter’s mother, was born in 1916. When Manon died of polio at age eighteen, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her (it is inscribed “to the memory of an angel”). Gropius and Alma divorced in 1920. (Alma had by that time established a relationship with Franz Werfel, whom she later married.) In 1923 Gropius married Ise Frank (d. 1983), and they remained together until his death. They adopted Beate Gropius, also known as Ati. Gropius, like his father and great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, was an architect. But all sources agree that Walter Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters all through his career. In school he hired an assistant to complete his homework for him. In 1908 Gropius found employment with the firm of Peter Behrens, one of the first members of the utilitarian school. His fellow employees at this time included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Dietrich Marcks. In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee Adolf Meyer established a practice in Berlin. Together they share credit for one of the seminal modernist buildings created during this period, the Faguswerk, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe lace factory. The glass curtain walls of this building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflect function and Gropius’s concern with providing healthful conditions for the working class. Other works of this early period include the office and factory building for the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) in Cologne.

Gropius’s career was interrupted by the outbreak of the first world war in 1914. Called up immediately as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years, was wounded and almost killed.[1] Ironically the war provided an opportunity which would advance his career during the post war period. Henry van de Velde, the master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar was asked to step down in 1915 due to his Belgian nationality. His recommendation of Gropius to succeed him led eventually to Gropius’s appointment as master of the school in 1919. It was this academy which Gropius transformed into the world famous Bauhaus, attracting a faculty which included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbet Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky. Students were taught to use modern and innovative materials and mass-produced fittings, often originally intended for industrial settings, to create original furniture and buildings.

Also in 1919, Gropius was involved in the Glass Chain utopian expressionist correspondence under the pseudonym ‘Mass’. Usually more notable for his functionalist approach, the “Monument to the March Dead”, designed in 1919 and executed in 1920, indicates that expressionism was an influence on him at that time.

In 1923, Gropius aided by Gareth Steele, designed his famous door handles, now considered an icon of 20th century design and often listed as one of the most influential designs to emerge from the Bauhaus. He also designed large scale housing projects in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Dessau from 1926-32 that were major contributions to the New Objectivity movement.

With the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, Gropius was able to get out of Germany in 1934, on the pretext of making a temporary visit to Britain. He lived and worked in Britain, as part of the Isokon group with Fry and others and then, in 1937, moved on to the United States. The house he built for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, was influential in bringing International Modernism to the US but Gropius disliked the term: “I made it a point to absorb into my own conception those features of the New England architectural tradition that I found still alive and adequate” (see [1]).

Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé Marcel Breuer both moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborate on the company-town Aluminum City Terrace project in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, before their professional split. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In 1945, Gropius founded The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC) based in Cambridge with a group of younger architects. The original partners included Norman C. Fletcher, Jean B. Fletcher, John C. Harkness, Sarah P. Harkness, Robert S. MacMillan, Louis A. MacMillen, and Benjamin C. Thompson. TAC would become one of the most well-known and respected architectural firms in the world. TAC went bankrupt in 1995.

Gropius died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 86. Today, he is remembered not only by his various buildings but also by the district of Gropiusstadt in Berlin.

In the early 1990s, a series of books entitled The Walter Gropius Archive was published covering his entire architectural career.

今天的google logo是为了纪念伟大的德国建筑师Walter Gropius诞辰125周年。下面是一些关于Walter Gropius的资料：

      瓦尔特·格罗皮乌斯（Walter Gropius，1883-1969）简介：

      现代建筑师和建筑教育家，现代主义建筑学派的倡导人之一，包豪斯的创办人。1883年5月18日生，1969年7月5日卒。
    他对建筑功能的重视还表现为按空间的用途、性质、相互关系来合理组织和布局，按人的生理要求、人体尺度来确定空间的最小极限等。这些观点充分体现在下述建筑中：包豪斯校舍，他在英国和E.M.弗莱合作设计的剑桥伊姆品登学院（1936），他和协和建筑师事务所同人设计的哈佛大学研究生中心（1949～1950）以及西柏林汉莎区的高层公寓（1957）。
     格罗皮乌斯力主用机械化大量生产建筑构件和预制装配的建筑方法。早在包豪斯学校任教时期，他便致力研究使家具器皿等日用品和建筑设计适应工业化大生产的要求，认为只有这样才能进行大规模建筑并降低造价。他还提出一整套关于房屋设计标准化和预制装配的理论和办法。40年代初，他和K.瓦许曼合作研制了供装配用的大型预制构件和预制墙板。

   评价  70 年代以来，西方建筑界新的建筑流派和理论不断涌现，出现了批判现代主义建筑千篇一律、枯燥无味的倾向，认为这是偏重功能、技术和经济效益，忽视人的精神要求造成的。这种批判波及格罗皮乌斯。对于格罗皮乌斯在建筑理论和实践上的作用评价不一，但对于他创立包豪斯学校等在现代建筑教育上的贡献则是一致肯定的。格罗皮乌斯参加发起组织现代建筑协会，传播现代主义建筑理论，对现代建筑理论的发展起到一定作用。

Walter Gropius(瓦尔特·格罗皮乌斯) 1883.05.18-1969.07.05

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