The Architect’s Newspaper - Jonathan Hilburg
For those craving a bit more personal insight into the life of the notoriously uptight Walter Gropius, Fiona MacCarthy’s biography will be sure to scratch that itch.
Irish Times
[A] meticulously researched, balanced and brilliantly written biography…MacCarthy refuses the often ill-researched reductionist characterizations of Gropius as the arrogant, dour modernist. Instead, she passionately weaves a gripping and powerful narrative deserving of a wide audience while also making for essential reading for anyone studying architecture and design.
Form - Michael Webb
[Gropius’s] achievements overshadow the man and it’s the great virtue of Fiona MacCarthy’s biography to bring this austere figure to life.
New Republic
MacCarthy transforms [Gropius] from a dull institutionalist—head of the Bauhaus and, later, prominent professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design—into a stylistic rebel who lived and loved in an exuberant community of artist outcasts that would be scattered across the world after Weimar Germany became the Third Reich. Whereas critics of the Bauhaus have seen it as the harbinger of giant faceless office towers and superhighways slicing through cities, MacCarthy presents the school as a fount of idealism: both an artistic collective, surging with creative energy, and a political project briefly filled with the angst and élan of a lost generation soon to be crushed by Hitler. Most of all, MacCarthy shows that Gropius’s true legacy was the talent he nurtured in others—I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson, Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, and Wassily Kandinsky, to name but a few.
Hilary Spurling
Gropius, too often dismissed as a chilly theorist, emerges in a clearer, subtler, and far more sympathetic light from Fiona MacCarthy’s wide-ranging and authoritative biography.
Evening Standard
MacCarthy’s enjoyable biography is an impressive achievement, finally giving us not just Gropius the architect in black and white, but the human being in full color.
Hyperallergic
A luminous, vigorous study of a prodigiously gifted man driven by singular passion.
Arts Fuse - Mark Favermann
MacCarthy is out to change wrong-headed perceptions in her biography…Rather than giving us a portrait of a mechanical architectural rationalist, she underscores Gropius’s humanity, and how that inspired his visionary philosophy as well as the consummate aesthetic courage he showed through an extremely volatile, even dangerous, political age.
Mohsen Mostafavi
MacCarthy’s lucid biography shows Gropius as a man of ideas who has indelibly influenced how we conceive of and respond to the environments that shape our everyday lives.
Literary Review
MacCarthy makes a compelling case for the architect as an impassioned idealist and romantic…An incredibly readable and rounded biography and gives credit where it’s due to the formidable women who shaped him.
Stephen Bayley
Saint or sinner? Visionary or myopic? In the century since the Bauhaus opened, its founder Walter Gropius has been lionised and demonised. Did Gropius inspire the world’s most influential and humane art school, or was he the evil genius of miserable industrial culture? Fiona MacCarthy is Britain’s first and best writer on design. She rescues Gropius’s reputation in a book full of learning, insight, dry wit, and belief. Just like the man himself.
Booklist
[A] comprehensive portrait of the German-born architect best known for founding the Bauhaus…MacCarthy offers a buoyant account of her subject’s life.
New Yorker - Dan Chiasson
A comprehensive biography of the figure whom the painter Paul Klee, a teacher at the Bauhaus, called ‘the silver prince.’
The Guardian
MacCarthy’s book doesn’t claim to offer deep analysis of all of Gropius’s or the Bauhaus’s artistic output. But, as a way of bringing the human stories of this extraordinary phenomenon to life, it’s hard to beat.
The Arts Desk
[A] revelatory biography…Strikingly readable…Gropius emerges here as a kind of obsessive, passionate genius…Transforms our understanding of the history and significance not only of Gropius but of the group of 1930s innovators who comprised the movement.
Architectural Record - Caroline Rob Zaleski
An engrossing read.
Choice
Presents a lively portrait of this seminal figure. The book brims with personal details…This is an enjoyable, well-written portrait of a giant of 20th-century modernism.
Edmund de Waal
This is an absolute triumph—ideas, lives, and the dramas of the twentieth century are woven together in a feat of storytelling. A masterpiece.
Moshe Safdie
A complex narrative about a complex man. Fiona MacCarthy’s richly detailed biography of Walter Gropius, one of the twentieth century’s most influential architects, reads like a detective story.
The Economist
A riveting book about a man who nurtured a vastly ambitious project through extraordinary times.
The Architect’s Newspaper - Barry Bergdoll
A great read, suitable for the beach, which Gropius and other Bauhäusler loved, from the banks of the Elbe to Cape Cod… An account of the sentimental journey of one of the most influential architects and pedagogues of the 20th century.
Sir Christopher Frayling
Fiona McCarthy has helped us to see Gropius in a radically different light. This is a very significant biography of a very significant man.
Booklist
[A] comprehensive portrait of the German-born architect best known for founding the Bauhaus…MacCarthy offers a buoyant account of her subject’s life.
Library Journal
04/01/2019
As much a teacher as a designer, the name Walter Gropius (1883–1969) is synonymous with European modernist architecture. Like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, the architect spent his formative years in the office of Peter Behrens. In 1915, he became director of the future Bauhaus, a school based on the principle of unifying the design arts to effect social change. Inimical to modernism as sympathetic to bolshevism, the National Socialist movement closed the state-supported school, resulting in the dispersal of its instructors and their transcendent vision of design clarity to places as disparate as London, Chicago, and Tel Aviv. This biography, with its linear chronology and tripartite structure based on the architect's localities, blends the author's research expertise from her 1995 William Morris biography with the juicier, more personal approach of romantic histories in the popularized lives of Mies and Frank Lloyd Wright. VERDICT For architectural historians, the bibliographic essays within the sources section will be the book's most significant contribution. Suitable for comprehensive architectural history collections, this will further complement Sigfried Giedion's more polemical Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork and James Marston Fitch's 1960 biography.—Paul Glassman, Yeshiva Univ. Libs., New York
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2019-02-03
A fresh biography of the influential modernist architect who shaped aesthetics from the 1920s to our own time.
Award-winning biographer and design and architecture critic MacCarthy (The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination, 2011, etc.) brings insight and sensitivity to a sweeping, penetrating life of Walter Gropius (1883-1969), founder of the Bauhaus, an experimental community of architects, sculptors, painters, and craftsmen. Established in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus, in its early years, was devoted to craft, owing "so very much," Gropius admitted, to William Morris' Arts and Crafts movement. Soon, influenced by Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy, who joined the community as a teacher, Gropius changed the emphasis "from the handmade and romantic to the clean-cut and mechanistic," leading to a "smooth-lined, restrained, subtly geometric" design that became emblematic of Bauhaus style in architecture, furniture, and art. The school attracted brilliant artists as teachers, including Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, and Marcel Breuer. But there was often conflict among them and, after the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, between the community and "less enlightened members" of the public. Money was a perennial problem, as well; in 1928, Gropius resigned and moved to Berlin, where he aligned himself with a radical group of architects who hoped to go beyond "the design of individual buildings into the economic planning of whole cities." By 1932, however, architectural innovations faced Nazi artistic censorship, and Gropius was vilified. MacCarthy follows Gropius' career in Britain and the U.S. after he left Germany in 1935 and, a few years later, became chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where his students included such eminent architects as I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson. Besides following Gropius' professional life, the author vibrantly portrays his love affairs, marriages (notably to the turbulent Alma Mahler), the death of his beloved daughter, and his close, sometimes-strained friendships. Altogether, she produces a multidimensional portrait of a towering, complex figure whose ideas, one historian remarked, "reshaped the world."
Engrossing, impressively researched, and keenly perceptive.
