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Celebrating 100 Years of Bauhaus Visiting Gropius House on the Equinox

The integration of art into all aspects of life is an ideal situation.

April 12, 2019 was the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus school’s founding in Weimar, Germany. Established by Walter Gropius, the institution’s Proclamation described a utopian craft guild that combined architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression.

After immersion in a theory of materials, color, and formal relationships, Bauhaus students would enter specialized workshops, which included metalworking, cabinetmaking, weaving, pottery, typography, wall painting, music, and theater.

I am fortunate to be surrounded by friends who are living examples of this Gesamtkunstwerk (“all-embracing art form”) aesthetic. Envisioning life as a cross-pollinating, living work of art, our community of artist-makers fills life with beauty and function.

For instance, I went to visit Hapi in Arlington, MA, during the spring equinox, and he suggested taking a tour of the Gropius’ home in nearby Lincoln. 

A recent article, “The 80-Year-Old Gropius House in Lincoln Is a Modernist Marvel,” published in Boston magazine explains the locale’s history:

Lured by a post at Harvard, Gropius had relocated to Massachusetts in 1937 with his wife, Ise, and daughter, Ati, renting a house in Lincoln while they planned for a home of their own. At the request of a mutual friend, philanthropist Helen Osborne Storrow provided land for and financed the construction of the new abode—a boon for a family that had been forced to abandon assets when they fled Nazi Germany for London in 1934. While Gropius and his partner Marcel Breuer were the official architects, the design was discussed nightly around the dinner table. Ise was the chief landscaper, and 12-year-old Ati offered input, too, requesting her own private entrance. Dad obliged with an outdoor spiral staircase, a curvy counterpoint to the clean-lined exterior that, he later wrote, “proved to be very practical because children could enter there directly without carrying dirt through the house.”

Admiring the inviting house, full of soulful, practical, and whimsical objects, beautiful as they sit frozen in time—as well as the largest collection of Bauhaus furniture outside of Germany—Hapi and I walked around and admired details like pre-Columbian statues gifted by Frida Kahlo, art by Joan Miró and Josef Albers on the walls, an early Marimekko dress neatly placed on the bed, and a theatrical light fixture that illuminate the dining room circle exactly to its edge.