Who is; 3; Walter Gropius

. . . . The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. .

I didn't tell your students that neither Kobli, nor Miss Wonder War, nor Frank Lloyd Wright, nor myself have ever met an examined architecture. I ran away from here. I ran away from here. It was so silly that one day I turned around and went away and went into practice. No, that's very bad at that time. The dinner party is for Walter Gropius, now 84, on a business trip to Europe, with his close associate Alex Fionnevitch. There's a beautiful lake that is given by architect Lord Luwelyn Davis at his London home. He was a theater man in the architecture. He really knew how to create tension and how to leave it by a push. Of course. You see,

I'm looking around where could I find something which seems to be permanent. The only country I've found where this is Japan. The interesting thing is that in our profession, they are in the best sense, modern, and in the best sense, Japanese. All throughout, they go in one direction. Whereas in Europe, as well as in the States, we go in many directions. We haven't found yet a real basic fundamental. Because we know the old society went to pieces and the new one is in the making, but I'm trying to look for some constructive lines and I can't find them yet. Gropius broke with traditional architectural continuity himself in the stagnated Germany of the early 1900s. He tried instead to establish a new tradition based on the needs of ordinary people in the 20th century. The housing for the Siemens factory workers in Berlin built in 1928 by Gropius and Associates was the first scientific approach

to the problem of limited space and sunlight. Its impact on younger architects like Alex Fionnevitch is still being felt. In this particular set of buildings, when I first came here and saw it and tried to transpose myself into that time, it was unbelievable that somebody should come up with something so radically new. We don't really innovate so often. We graft on, we perfect, we develop things, but these times were times of really innovation and it is still almost incomprehensible to us, to young architect who comes for the first time to the spot and sees the building belonging very much to 1950s and 60s. Seize it on the spot and has to tie it into the early 20s or late 20s. Well,

of course, balconies, for instance, kind of levered this way off the corner of the building is both a visual and structural innovation. There is generally a great attempt to purify the over ornamentation of the 19th century just with one stroke erased, done with, it's gone. And this was the other great merit of that era is the purification of the architect. We are coming back to it now, we need some relief on the buildings, but it was necessary, absolutely necessary, to take away the fake that the 19th century architecture was absolutely cluttered with. The Faga's shoe factory built by Gropius at the age of 28

was arguably the first piece of clear modern architecture. It was the first building in which an architect took advantage of the support of steel girders to replace the usual stone walls and corners which no longer bore the weight with curtains of glass. Not only did this produce unprecedented lightness of form, but was the first demonstration of Gropius' humanist concern for the user. This concern soon led to the formation of a school which was to have a lasting effect on modern life. The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, and joined by Kandinsky, Clay, Mies van der Rohe and others in response to the cultural chaos after the war, and the 19th century legacy of visually cluttered forms divorced from function. Gropius' aim was to fuse form and function, not only in architecture, but in all areas of industrial design, and to relate arts and crafts to each other, and through mass production to everyday life. This idea, rather than any specific style, was the goal of the Bauhaus, and still reverberates through present -day thought. It

makes much of their output, including Gropius' great Bauhaus school building, seem modern even now 40 years later. The question I never asked you before is how do you explain the attraction that Bauhaus had on the people of the time like Clay, Kandinsky, Albert, and the others? What was it that made them come to the Bauhaus? Would try to find a common denominator? What can we give the other man, or as an independent thing, which fits every human being from his

physiological and psychological point of view, which we can hand out to him to build them up himself? This was the thing for Kandinsky and Clay and Mouli and so on, not transporting himself on the student, but trying to build up these objective things and destroying imitation. They all did destroy imitation. They all agreed with me that that was necessary to do. It is natural that every student tries to imitate his teacher. They cannot avoid that, but he should know that it does not. Then he comes finally to himself. So this was the real contribution the Bauhaus did that. We tried to put that on an objective basis. This is the only thing we can teach. We cannot teach art. Art is an Indian thing. If a guy becomes an explosive personality and he has achieved to know a lot of things, then he may be able to express himself and bring something very personally out. But this is

not the thing which can be taught by teachers or so. I have tried to put a little bit up on that, and I was always waiting for others who would add to it. But I have the feeling that there is only tiny little bit of a dent. And that it takes several generations before something carries through. And I tell you one case, in the 30s, I was making propaganda and Berlin for the high rise, residential building. And I was absolutely ridiculed by the whole press and Martin Baal, and so on. And now, a little bit over 30 years later, I have to put the brakes on in Berlin that they don't do too much. The same thing. Now, imagine when I think of my early use, I grew up in Berlin. We had open gas flames. Nothing else was there. There was no electrical tramway. Nothing was all by a horse and buggy or a horse and tramway behind it. The only thing which existed was a telegraph that had just begun for the government. We looked here in this house.

My sister married in that house. We stayed there for many years, for many years. But my sister left. And I was in very good terms with her. I was desperate for the thought of being alone there that wasn't alive anymore. And right after the war, the middle of a telegraph. We had a riding way, right in the center of the coffers, and I'm out to Haranze. That I didn't experience. But here in the neighborhood, there was Buffalo Bill in a big open park coming over from the lake. I saw that as a boy, you know. It was all open, all open. Now, it's to a chance, everything built over. So that is a lifetime. Of course, the roots come from the classic and Renaissance. Always a little bit the Renaissance pellets in mind. But we choose to simple building.

There was always some plasticity in the facade, which was giving shadows, you know. And I compare that always with the two naked and two flat appearances of the modern buildings. Because when it is an absolutely dead surface, and the sun goes around, nothing happens. But when you have ins and outs, and the sun goes around, the shadow changes every hour. So this is very similar to what my great uncle Marty Gopius did in Berlin. The details look like him, so the finesse and the profiles. We almost pleases so much. And I see an old side street, there's this one, that they have these very generous pathways for the pedestrian. Of course, I knew all these streets still without the automobile. But in other streets, the automobile has pressed the pedestrian against the walls. Now, when you have these white pathways here, nothing happens. It's still very generous. It's interesting, however, how much

it changes in detail and gives it quite a bit of a variety throughout that. Yeah, well, there were different individuals. So it's a common denominator, but there's no variation. It's what I like very much, you know. Unity and variety. This was formerly the Chinese Embassy. I still remember going as a small boy, a long year, with my sister and our foyline. And before I was a Chinese, with this long appearing down there. And my sister couldn't stay away and went in order to touch the hair of the Chinese. And he's smiling, turned around and let her do it, you know. Square is also a working canal, you know. But you ever swim in it? No, it was always pretty dirty. Yes, it wouldn't be permitted to swim in it. No.

It's very different now. We have no high buildings. Actually, I could go. This is the Philharmonie. I've seen this, you're all down and empty -bombed -outed. So reassuring that you see the green growing up again and pretty girls coming back again and so on. Oh, you can't go on there. Let's see. You know, this was very lively street, particularly the hard, further away from here. It was really the heart of the city, British Dase. And it crossed the Uttar Linn, you know. There's something awfully unreal about this street. A big city, a normal city street, to be cut into with a wall. The whole thing has been done without any understanding. It's just made a line and then they have followed that with a

wall. I've had fitted it into the street system or not, didn't care. So it's absolutely absurd. And they made it a complete separation. There's no exchange from east to west anymore. They have not been able to get in touch with the eastern town planning people. We don't even know what they have in mind. We have started to do something on the west side to make that livable. But when we come to the wall, there is no way out to say it or fail. I cannot even talk about it. So it's so sad. You know, it's just absurd and senseless in human. That's all I can say. We better go home. Despite the wall, Gropius is still building in Berlin. But as usual, he is defending his principles against short -sighted shortcuts by local authorities. He has supervised the master plan of Gropiusstadt, a housing project for 50 ,000 families. But he is resisting attempts to overcrowd the area with tall buildings

and reduce the size of rooms to save money, which is short at the moment. His concern is the quality of life to be lived there half a century ahead. Gropius has designed two of the buildings himself, a 30 -story apartment block, and always his favorite task, a school. This one is an experiment in layout using a central pentagon -shaped common room giving off to the specialized classrooms in stairways. At 84, he could easily pass on the project having produced the idea. But Gropius wants to be sure the finishing touches, the decor and landscaping make a unity with the surroundings as a whole. Like almost all of his work over 60 years, the school was designed in collaboration with others. At present, he works with 150 people, many his ex -students from his highly influential decade as chairman of the Harvard School of Architecture. His firm, called the Architects Collaborative, is

based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Gropius and his family settled after escaping from the Nazis. His style has not altered markedly throughout his career, but he still remains a prolific collaborator. I'm thinking, how far do we want to go? I don't want to go further. I want to intensify, but not increasingly, but having the courage to do away with this or that job in order to get the better one to find the girl. There are people working small teams. What we do is the top team is repeated in the smaller team carrying food.

We have no bus system anymore at all. What's that? Gropius sees the Architect as a modern Renaissance man, combining art and science with sociology and economics. He was able to use glass for the corners of his first building by proving it was cheaper than stone. This half -circuit is 30, maybe there, then we have to take a few trees out so that you have a long view right into that half -circuit. Gropius uses the latest technology whenever possible. For this tower, he inspired a new material that eliminates the usual scaffolding, a saving which has prevented loss of quality elsewhere. What is it

actually made of? Oh, this is all sorts of chemicals in it, you know, but there's mainly asbestos. The final outside material is some routinely the form, because it's thick, it doesn't warp, it stands up absolutely straight. It's put in that way, now you put afterwards the insulation in and after the insulation wall in concrete or brick or whatever it is. Then the form is taken off and you go to the next story. This is a gliding scaffolding which goes up, that's it. But I'm most interested that there will be more relationship. We need to see the whole, everything is related to everything. I think I have only one little talent and there's this one three relations. And otherwise a medium -talented man, I know that, but

something which is absolutely evident to me, I find not evident with others, and I'm surprised with that. I work with a group of people and intellectually they immediately see that that it's a necessity, but intuitively they don't understand it, they don't do it, you know. It is too much bringing yourself into a status to create a monument for yourself and not seeing the right and the left. There's a gap in the street and somebody makes a project, that doesn't see right and left and goes only for himself and then it doesn't fit. This creative humility which I might call it is missing, you know? It's former times your head. Gropius feels the architect must do what he can to improve the lives in a whole community. He was among the first to develop and teach town planning, and in South and Germany Gropius has another project which has caught his imagination, the chance to redo an existing town

instead of tearing it all down as is usually done. In presenting the four stage 30 -year plan to the Selb town council, E and Alex Fionovic are trying to teach them how to see their town as a whole, as a living organism with a life and death cycle of its own, but one which need not be left to chance, it can be changed and shaped by an act of will. Gropius is very pleased about it because of the size of the town. Well, it's about 19 ,000 today and it was an old existing town. It's easy to go in an open field and start designing some scratch. What the interesting thing is that we have done very little today to prepare our town's smaller cities for absorption of the automobile. We have suddenly found ourselves in a life which jumped from the horse and buggy here into the automobile era and we've

just been flattened by the automobile. And the other thing is the town itself does not have any character of its own really. When you enter Selb, you never know when you were in the middle of the town and suddenly you're out of it. So we did try to create a recognizable space in the center of town that later on will be known. This is the heart of the town. And the second is to return the town to the pedestrian. And what is peculiar about the specific solution here is that the pedestrian area is very small in scale so that the man doesn't feel that he's severed from transportation for miles around. And the merchants, of course, will always protest and there's something behind it when you take the automobile

away from the stores. The stores must die because the deliveries cannot be made very well and then people just don't go there. So in this case we tried to line up the areas immediately behind this pedestrian street with parking and little delivery streets. So that the hope is then that the pedestrian can at any point walk through and be in the pedestrian haven. So in Selb, we started from this premise that we must preserve the character of the town and the neighborhood and the population the way it lives today and do it as gently and as painlessly as possible. And then that's what the community is most part of the professor. We have a very good idea. And here we have to note that we have to respect the people to be good so that it's our right as a plan. We have an open room and we

have a place to sit there and talk about it. We have a place to sit and talk about it. Well, we do not do individual architecture for ourselves. We just prepare the plan and suggest how spaces and places should be created. And one of our first suggestions, of course, is to build a new city hall because the present one just doesn't look much like a city hall. And the planning for Selb is really not redoing the town. It is simply helping the town along to grow into the new age gracefully. And second, and this is also peculiar to our time. Most of the cities and towns are guilty of misusing water or not using water or polluting water. And we are trying to

give the green and the water back to the town and connect the green right into the heart of the city. In fact, the new image of the city, the core of the city, takes the little stream and makes something out of it and pushes it right through the main plaza that will develop in front of the new city hall and the new courthouse. We are here at Rosenthal. I am from Erta, Professor Erhardt. My name is Minister. My name is Damund Herr.

Most jobs for Gropius as for every architect involve a difficult and too often unsuccessful struggle to achieve his original idea. The Rosenthal China factory in Selb was a welcome exception. We do not address any structural issues with regard to work אג due to a delay in particular. I don't

know whether this is true, or I can tell you the story. You all face the idea of doing this greenhouse was originally that we told you that the workmen always had flowers on their place of work because they had this longing for a little bit of natural color. First we tried with birds, with tropical birds and the people. They eat the plants or they were naughty onto the plants and the plants were completely ruined. These are the only birds that are so well bred that they only do it on the ground. This is before and of

course it's packed with machinery. You know in that way a building is never really finished. There is very different reactions from some of the workmen over here. The workmen that came from the cool which already is a modern factory as you know with large space. They are very very happy here but the people who've come from the old factory and sell where they were all in little cabinets where nobody saw them and where they could do what they like. They have to undergo some of the re -adjustment. You know it's really surprising by anybody's standards how much in this factory the attention was paid to the work here. This is NET. The national educational television

network.