Walter Gropius

Founder and first director of the Staatliches Bauhaus (Weimar 1919, Dessau 1925). Designed the Bauhaus Dessau building itself (1926) — the schoolhouse-as-manifesto. After emigrating to the US in 1937 he chaired Harvard's Graduate School of Design and co-founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC).

Gropius's institutional impact may exceed his built impact: the Bauhaus pedagogy of foundation-course-then-workshop reshaped twentieth-century design education on every continent.