Walter Gropius Quotes

Architecture begins where engineering ends.
If your contribution has been vital there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off, and that will be your claim to immortality.
Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.
Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.
Specialists are people who always repeat the same mistakes.
Architects, sculptors painters, we all must return to the crafts! For art is not a 'profession.' There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman.
As there is in Germany - as well as in Russia and Italy - no art which is not approved of by the government, any criticizing remark about the present policy made by me would easily be taken as a hostile act. I cannot have my name put up against an official report from Germany without risking very unpleasant consequences.
Capitalism and power politics have made our generation creatively sluggish, and our vital art is mired in a broad bourgeois philistinism.
Each person feels that he is an 'expert' in one or two fields and just the 'public' in all the others. But you know, probably, from experience that no one is really able to appreciate any display of ability in any field if he himself has not, to a certain degree, taken part in its problems and difficulties at some time.
Good architecture should be a projection of life itself, and that implies an intimate knowledge of biological, social, technical, and artistic problems.
I am livid with rage, sitting here in chains through this mad war which kills any meaning of life... My nerves are shattered and my mind darkened.
I cannot imagine myself fitting into the existing curriculum. I am too self-willed for that and have had my own very definite ideas for a long time, very different from the existing ways, as to how architecture is to be taught.
I feel very German - and who can make himself a judge over what is German and what is not - in my ideas and the ideas of my spiritual brothers of German origin.
If we investigate the vague feelings of the average man towards the arts, we find that he is timid and that he has developed a humble belief that art is something which has been invented centuries ago in countries like Greece or Italy and that all we can do about it is study it carefully and apply it.
In all great epochs of history, the existence of standards - that is, the conscious adoption of type-forms - has been the criterion of a polite, well-ordered society; for it is a commonplace that repetition of the same things for the same purpose exercises a settling and civilizing influence on men's minds.
Let us together create the new building of the future, which will be everything in one form: architecture and sculpture and painting.
Man has evolved a mutual relationship with nature on earth, but his power to change its surface has grown so tremendously that this may become a curse instead of a blessing.
My sole aim is to leave everything in suspension, in flux, in order to avoid our community solidifying into a conventional academy. Our initial resources may be few, but our spirits are high, receptive, and excited, and that seems to me to be the most important thing right now.
New synthetic substances - steel, concrete, glass - are actively superseding the traditional raw materials of construction.
One of the outstanding achievements of the new constructional technique has been the abolition of the separating function of the wall.
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AuthorName
Walter Gropius
Profession
Architect
BirthDate
18 May, 1883
DeathDate
05 July, 1969
Country
Germany
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