When Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement, arrived in the United States in February of 1937, he was given what many architects would dream of having at their disposal: $20,000 (equivalent to almost $345,000 in 2017) to build his house, and 5 acres of land in rural Lincoln, Massachusetts to build it on. He would live at this house from its completion in 1937 until his death in 1969; his widow lived there until her own death in 1983, after which the house became a museum.
When I took a tour of this house last Saturday, one thing I was struck by was just how well-planned, designed, and built it was. What did Gropius do with the design that made it so great? Here are some things I noticed, either during the tour or upon reflection after the tour.
- He kept the size reasonable
Looking around the outside of the house, I was first struck by how small it was, especially for what was an architect's home. At 2,300 square feet, it's 600 square feet smaller than the 1790 farmhouse I grew up in (and which my parents still live in), not to mention most contemporary McMansions (or even what are considered average sized houses). However, when taking a tour through the interior, you see that not a square inch of space is wasted; there are no redundant or unnecessary rooms, like having 2 living rooms or similar spaces (the only thing approaching redundancy is the fact that the house had both a ground-level screened-in porch and an observation deck on the 2nd floor; however, those 2 locations give very different views of the surrounding area). In that 2,300 square feet, Gropius managed to design a house that had room for 3 bedrooms (including a master bedroom with a large dressing area), a maid's quarters, a home office, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, screened-in porch, and observation deck. Part of how Gropius managed to fit all of that into such a small space was by not wasting any area with hallways; all of the rooms were reached through a central entryway with a spiral staircase (which used less space than a regular staircase, and which echoed the spiral staircase on the outside of the house)*.
It also makes sense that he kept the size modest, considering that this house was as much an experiment as it was a residence; with a larger house, he might have bitten off more than he could chew. In addition, it was the goal in Bauhaus to make designs (including housing) which could be mass-produced and affordable for almost all classes and income levels; a house like the Gropius House was intended to be affordable for most middle-class families.
- He incorporated elements of existing architecture into the house
In designing this house, Gropius didn't simply take a German Bauhaus design and copy its design in Massachusetts; the Gropius House incorporated several traditional New England architectural elements, including the use of clapboard siding**. However, he didn't use it in a completely traditional manner; first of all it was mounted vertically on the house (the Gropius House is a rather horizontal design to begin with, and using horizontal siding would have probably produced the same effect as what happens when an overweight person wears a horizontally-striped shirt), and it was also mounted inside the entryway, to make it easier to hang up and rearrange art:
In this way, Gropius made a house that was innovative but one which also had traditional elements. Also, the lighting fixture in the above picture was an existing design, but normally used in places like movie theaters and department stores; much of the materials and fixtures being used in this house (like the glass bricks) had already been used in industrial and commercial applications. What the Gropius House did was to use these for the first time in a residential environment.
- The layout of the house is extremely well-designed
To simplify plumbing, all four bathrooms are located in a cluster, with 2 right next to each other and directly above the other 2. This greatly simplified plumbing, so that all of the house's toilets and baths could be supplied from a single vertical "column" of pipes. Other examples of good design include the use of glass bricks to form the wall between the home office and the dining room; this allowed sunlight to pass through the house's large windows and into both rooms.
The glass bricks in the wall also echo the glass bricks on the outside of the house:
Another element of the house which deals with sunlight is this overhang over the second-floor deck and rear of the house. This overhang is positioned in such a way that it shades the windows below from the sun in the summer (when the sun's high in the sky) but allows sunlight to heat the windows in winter when the sun is lower to the horizon.
Yet another way that space in the house is well-used is the use of curtains in the interior to create temporary partitions in rooms. Like the use of shoji screens in Japanese architecture, these allow rooms to be reconfigured as needed. One place that uses a curtain is the living room/dining room; without the curtain, the area is one large L-shaped room, but with the curtain in place the living and dining rooms are separate locations. He could have put in a wall or sliding door, but that would have made the two rooms look smaller and more cramped (and there would have been no possibility of configuring room in its "open" L-shaped state, if, for example, there was a large number of guests there). Another place where it was a good idea to use a curtain instead of a wall and door was in an alcove in the second floor entryway; with a wall and door, this space would have probably been little more than a closet, but with a curtain it became a favorite spot for Ise (Walter's wife) to do her sewing.
- The house suits the landscape and the landscape, the house
When Gropius got the property he built his house on, there was already a working apple orchard on the premises. Gropius designed his house to feature a prominent view of the orchard through the large picture window in the ground floor living room, and from the upstairs deck. Looking out the opposite direction when Walter and Ise lived there would have shown a well-tended garden along with surrounding fields and forests. The screened-in back porch would have given different views of the landscape as well.
- Everything in the house complements the architecture
In addition to the design of the house itself, the furniture and artwork, and even objects like appliances and table settings fit the house perfectly. Considering that a major element of the philosophy of Bauhaus was the importance of good design in everyday objects***, and that Bauhaus sought to be an all-encompassing school of design, it's worth thinking of the objects inside the Gropius House as part of the house's architecture.
- It's an example of modern architecture that looks good and functions well
When people talk about hating "modern architecture", they often picture buildings like the hideous and dysfunctional Brutalist
Boston City Hall (or buildings with similar attributes found on
numerous college campuses****), or Frank Gehry's various postmodern designs, which
dump piles of snow over the emergency exits, or which
blind motorists and treat pedestrians like ants under a magnifying glass. In contrast, the Gropius House is built on a human scale, with a well-thought-out floor plan and no wasted space (and conversely, no small, cramped rooms) and whose structure seems to still be holding up well today after 80 years. It's modern architecture that works.
- It's a modern house that looks like people actually lived there
All too often when viewing a modern house, one gets the impression that living there would be a sterile and austere existence. The preservation society did an excellent job of demonstrating the house as a pleasant place to live, in part by making it look like the Gropiuses are still there. Ise's hats and coats still hang in the entryway, there are logs in the fireplace, the dining-room table is set, the kitchen has an open cookbook on the counter and (plastic) food being prepared, and Walter and Ise's desk is covered with their work
(the two often collaborated in their work). Photographs displayed around the house show images of everyday life, like Walter playing ping-pong on the screened-in porch.
Finally, I must say that probably the biggest reason I liked this house so much was that this house in many ways is an antidote to the kind of house I lived in for much of my adolescence and adulthood, and the houses I was surrounded by while living there. I lived for many years with my parents in a former farmhouse built in 1790 (with a large extension added on in the early 20th century). It was a large, rambling house with several small and cluttered rooms. Surrounding our house were several subdivisions of McMansions, which were also what this house was not; large houses on small lots with overly complicated rooflines and poorly thought out floor plans (often with great quantities of wasted space), houses which used expensive materials when it came to surface appearance (like using expensive marble countertops in the kitchen) but cutting corners with structural materials and quality with the result that many of those houses were falling apart less than 10 years after they were built.
The Gropius house is everything the above houses are not: with its reasonable size, high quality of construction, well-planned layout, and the way it fits in with the surrounding landscape, this house really resonated with me from the moment I saw it.
*The spiral staircase on the outside of the house was one of Walter's adopted daughter Beate ("Ati")'s requests; she wanted to have a way to access outside from her room. It's worth noting that the banister for the interior spiral staircase is the only custom-made item in the entire structure; all of the other fixtures and components were existing designs.
**Although this house was sometimes described as "International Style", Gropius always objected to the term being applied to this house. He said that he would have never designed this house in Europe, with its different construction materials and architectural traditions; this house was specifically designed for this location.
***Perhaps the best example of this outlook on design is the the Bauhaus movement's philosophy that "It is often more difficult to design a first-rate teapot than to paint a second-rate painting."
****Note: this comic brings up the oft-repeated
myth that colleges used Brutalist architecture to suppress student riots.
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