Gropius House

Gropius House stands in Lincoln, Massachusetts, completed in 1938 as the personal residence of the architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school in Germany, built shortly after he emigrated to the United States to teach architecture at Harvard University. The house combines European modernist principles of function-driven design and industrial materials, including glass block, acoustical plaster and chrome banisters drawn from industrial catalogs, with traditional New England building elements such as wood framing, fieldstone and clapboard siding, an intentional synthesis of Bauhaus ideas with local vernacular construction. Gropius designed the house both as a family home and as a demonstration piece meant to show how modernist architectural principles could be adapted to an American context and climate, and it became an influential model for the wave of Modern residential design that spread through New England in subsequent decades. Historic New England acquired the house from the Gropius family in 1984, and it is preserved today largely as it was furnished during Gropius's lifetime, complete with much of his original Bauhaus-designed furniture.