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Gropius House, 68 Baker Bridge Road, Lincoln, Middlesex County, MA

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Gropius House, 68 Baker Bridge Road, Lincoln, Middlesex County, MA

description

Summary

Significance: Built in 1938, the Gropius House is important as an exemplary example of the International style and for its association with pioneering Modernist architect Walter Gropius, who designed it as his own residence. As the founder of the German Bauhaus and an early proponent of the International style, Walter Gropius is considered one of the founding fathers of the Modern architecture movement in America. He immigrated to the United States in 1937 and accepted a position at Harvard's Graduate School of Design where he indoctrinated new generations of architects with his modern design philosophy. His house combines conventional materials such as fieldstone and wood with new materials such as glass block, chrome, and acoustical plaster to create a nontraditional, asymmetrical dwelling based on principles of simplicity, economy and functionality. In keeping with the International style, the house incorporates broad expanses of glass to allow for natural light while blurring the boundaries between inside and out in to be in harmony with the surrounding landscape.
Survey number: HABS MA-1228
Building/structure dates: 1938 Initial Construction
National Register of Historic Places NRIS Number: 00000709

The Bauhaus was influenced by 19th and early-20th-century artistic directions such as the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as Art Nouveau and its many international incarnations, including the Jugendstil and Vienna Secession. In the Weimar Republic, a renewed liberal spirit allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts. The most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a movement whose origins lay as early as the 1880s. After World War Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. The Bauhaus style, however, also known as the International Style, was marked by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design. Bauhaus is characterized by simplified forms, rationality, and functionality, and the idea that mass production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit.

date_range

Date

1938 - 1980
person

Contributors

Historic American Buildings Survey, creator
Gropius, Walter, architect & owner
Breuer, Marcel, furniture designer
place

Location

create

Source

Library of Congress
copyright

Copyright info

No known restrictions on images made by the U.S. Government; images copied from other sources may be restricted. http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/114_habs.html

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