House tour: Gropius House
Gropius House (1938)
A few months ago, I visited the Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts. It had been on my list of places to visit for a long time, and it finally made sense on a drive up to Maine.
Walter Gropius (1883-1969), German architect and founder of the Bauhaus school, exiled Nazi Germany in 1934 and emigrated to the United States after a few years in the U.K.
In 1937, Gropius arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts along with his wife Ise and their young daughter Ati to become professor of architecture at Harvard University. The Nazi regime had prevented the couple from bringing any cash assets out of the country; they only had their furniture, books and office files.
Gropius was offered a piece of borrowed land and a modest budget to build a house for himself in nearby Lincoln. The house combined new, innovative materials with traditional elements of New England architecture such as brick and fieldstone. Fixtures were selected from industrial catalogues, with the exception of a custom-made handrail for the staircase. The result is a modest, functional and beautiful home, as well as a prime example of the Bauhaus design principles.
The interiors feature smart details such as a living room bed, a curtain to hide dirty dishes, vertical wall mount slats for flexible picture hanging, and lots of drapes to define and alter spaces.
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