German-American architect, founder of the Bauhaus — the Weimar-era school that, in fourteen years of existence across three cities (Weimar, Dessau, Berlin) before the Nazis closed it in 1933, reorganized what design education meant and exported, through its exiled faculty, a set of commitments that shaped the look and the teaching of modern design across the 20th century. Gropius trained in Berlin under Peter Behrens (alongside Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier), served in the First World War, and in 1919 took over two existing Weimar art schools to create the Staatliches Bauhaus.
The founding manifesto — a woodcut cathedral by Lyonel Feininger on the cover, a utopian text calling for the reunion of the arts under the primacy of Bau (building) — was in a direct line of descent from William Morris's arts-and-crafts socialism, reworked for the industrial moment after the war. The Bauhaus refused the distinction between fine and applied arts, put every student through a preliminary year (the Vorkurs) taught by Itten and later Moholy-Nagy in the basics of material, form, and color, and aimed at a total integration of design with industrial production. Its aesthetic — geometric, rational, shorn of ornament — became, through the Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition (1927), the Barcelona Pavilion (Mies, 1929), and a thousand imitators, the visual language of "International Style" modernism.
Gropius was never the purest architect of the school (Mies, his successor, arguably was) but he was its political and pedagogical architect. He resigned as director in 1928, fled to England in 1934 and to Harvard in 1937, where as chair of the Graduate School of Design he transplanted Bauhaus pedagogy into the American academy — an intervention that defined American architectural education for a generation. The Pan Am Building in New York (1963), his late commercial work, is among his weaker legacies; the Fagus Factory (1911, pre-Bauhaus) and the Dessau Bauhaus building (1925–26) are the ones that have aged into their own landmarks.