Walter Gropius

Hello! My name is Walter Gropius, and I was an architect. An architect is someone who designs buildings. I was born a very long time ago, on May 18th, 1883, in a city called Berlin, which is in a country called Germany. Even when I was a little boy, I loved to imagine and design new things. It was like building with blocks, but in my head! My family had many architects, so I grew up surrounded by drawings and ideas for big buildings. I loved thinking about how to make them better and more beautiful for everyone who would use them.

When I grew up, I had a very big idea for a new kind of school. In the year 1919, I started my school and gave it a special name: the Bauhaus. At the Bauhaus, we believed that artists and people who make things with their hands, called craftspeople, should work together. We didn't just teach painting or just building. We brought everyone together to create things that were simple, useful, and beautiful all at once. It was a very exciting place! We designed everything from teapots and chairs to entire buildings! Our ideas were so popular that our school grew. In 1925, I even designed a brand new building for our school in a city called Dessau. It was special because it had giant glass walls that made it look like it was floating. It let all the sunshine in for the students to work.

After a while, the leaders in my home country of Germany didn't like our new, modern ideas. They thought our art and buildings looked too different. It became a place that wasn't safe for my family and our way of thinking anymore. So, in 1937, we made a big decision and moved all the way across the ocean to America. It was a new adventure! I got a job teaching other young architects at a famous university called Harvard. In 1938, I even got to design my own family's house there. I filled it with lots of light and used the simple, useful ideas from my Bauhaus school.

I lived to be 86 years old, and I spent my whole life sharing my ideas about design. Today, people remember me for starting the Bauhaus school and for helping to create a new style of building called modern architecture. My ideas about making useful things beautiful are still used by designers and architects all over the world, helping to make our homes, schools, and cities better places to live.