WALTER GROPIUS
Siegfried Giedion
Siegfried Giedion: WALTER GROPIUS. Paris: Les Editions G. Cres, 1931. First edition. Text in French. Slim quarto. Photo illustrated thick wrappers. 48 pp. 32 héliogravure plates. Spine lightly chipped and wrappers lightly spotted, but a very good copy.
5.75 x 7.5 softcover book with 48 pages including 32 beautiful héliogravure plates of the early work of Walter Gropius, showcasing the years prior to his tenure at the Bauhaus, and a few projects between 1928 to 1930. One volume of “Les Artistes Nouveaux” series published by G. Cres Editions in the early 1930s. Gropius was one of only four architects included in this modernist series, along with Adolf Loos and the pair of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret.
Contents include beautiful héliogravure plates of the Bauhaus Buildings, Dessau, 1926; Gropius House, Bauhaus, Dessau , 1926; Total Theater Models And Sketches and others.
First comprehensive study of the Bauhaus master by Sigfried Giedion (1888 – 1968 ) the Bohemian-born Swiss historian and architecture critic. His ideas and books, Space, Time and Architecture, and Mechanization Takes Command, had an important conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s era. He was the first secretary-general of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne [CIAM]. He has also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. He was a cool dude and knew everybody.
Between 1911, when he started the Functionalist movement with his design of the Fagus Factory to his directorship of the Bauhaus (in Weimar and Dessau), to his brief adventures in England to his founding of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) has been at the epicenter of the modern movement. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, Gropius made inestimable contributions to his field, to the point that knowing his work is crucial to understanding Modernism. His early buildings, such Fagus Boot-Last Factory and the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, with their use of glass and industrial features, are still indispensable points of reference. After his emigration to the United States, he influenced the education of architects there and became, along with Mies van der Rohe, a leading proponent of the International Style.