Bauhaus Builder

"Now, for the first time, when I have reached 70, things look safe for a while," said Architect Walter Gropius on his birthday last week. "At long last, I am beginning to build much more than was possible in the so often unsettled past. The coming years should be the happiest and best fulfilled of my entire life." After 34 years as one of architecture's greatest thinkers and teachers, Walter Gropius was starting what amounts to a brand-new career.

The guests at his birthday party in Chicago got a chance to see what Gropius has been up to since he left Harvard's Graduate School of Design last year (TIME, July 14). The founder of Germany's famed Bauhaus showed 300 friends and colleagues a model of a sheer, glass-walled office building, as clean and functional as a tumbler, which will rise 18 stories near Chicago's Loop. Also on display was an immense aerial view of Chicago's project to redevelop seven square miles of the city's South Side, including a spacious new hospital in a lakefront garden setting which Gropius is working on.

Back in Boston, Gropius is the leader of an eight-architect team at work on six modern schools for Massachusetts and New Hampshire; his team is also designing a radical, prismatic-shaped office building in Washington with windows that have what Gropius calls "eyebrows"--steel and glass louvers that push out horizontally as protection against the summer sun. And there are plans for modern housing developments that make Gropius' eyes light up with joy. His team of architects is designing two of them near Boston, one of 30 houses, one of 60.

It is the housing of tomorrow that excites Gropius most. "In the future," he says, "the artist is to be the brother of the engineer and manufacturer . . . What we need is a unity . . . An old New England town, with its white buildings, has a unity and kinship, but when you look closely, every single one of these white buildings differs from all the rest. A house with 100,000 exact duplicates is not the answer . . . The machine must be adapted to the individual.. . . Machines can cut costs and improve quality by making millions of prefabricated parts, and yet the houses built from these parts can look enough different so that when you come [home] from a cocktail party you can find your own door . . ."

Lean and clear-eyed, Walter Gropius acts like a young man in a hurry. He has plans to visit South Africa, Chile, Australia. "I am going to Brazil later this year, and will visit Japan next year, but much more than to travel," says Gropius. "I want to work."

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