As members of Historic New England, www.historicnewengland.org we visited the Walter Gropius House in Lincoln; no doubt every architect reading this has either visited or read about the house he designed and built in 1938, in what was called the 'new international style', even though he hated that term. Born in Berlin in 1883, Gropius created the progressive German architectural school known as the Bauhaus in 1919, which the Nazis shut down in 1933, and became one of the most famous and influential architects of modern times. Gropius and his protégé Marcel Breuer taught architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

The house is only 2300 SF, but his plan called for extreme space- and energy-efficiency; for instance, he designed the narrow kitchen according to how and where the cooks move about to make the most use of the available space without getting in each other's way.  The design was a joint effort between Walter, his wife Alma, (widow of composer Gustav Mahler) and twelve-year-old daughter Beate, also known as Ati. Ati wanted her own private entryway and for her room to open onto a roof deck. She got the roof deck and a spiral staircase leading to outside. The many large plate glass windows let in plenty of light, and a screened in porch extends into the backyard. It's a unique blend of traditional New England building materials--wood, brick, and fieldstone--but the use of glass block, plaster, and chrome banisters, (which are way too far apart for today's codes), was unheard of in the residential construction of the time. 

The house still contains the Gropius family's original furniture and personal effects, such as Mrs. Gropius's toiletries on her vanity and one of her dresses hanging on her closet door, which she considered part of the decor. The house sits on five and a half acres surrounded by a Japanese garden and an apple orchard on a hill from which they could view Wachusett Mountain.

 

In 1945, Mr. Gropius formed The Architects Collaborative with Norman C. Fletcher, Jean B. Fletcher, Sarah Harkness, Robert McMillan, Louis McMillen, and Benjamin Thompson. TAC was a well respected architecture firm until their closure in 1995.

TAC became a client of ours in 1988, and we completed a cost estimate for the Kennedy School of Government Taubman Center, among others.

 

Mr. Gropius died in Boston in 1969 at age 86.

 

His daughter Ati is in her 80s and makes occasional visits to her childhood home from her present home on the Cape.

 

Well worth a visit!