Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Walter Gropius, fully Walter Adolph Georg Gropius

German Architect and Founder of the Bauhaus School along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

"Architecture begins where engineering ends."

"A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities."

"Architects, painters, sculptors, we must all return to crafts! For there is no such thing as "professional art". There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman. By the grace of Heaven and in rare moments of inspiration which transcend the will, art may unconsciously blossom from the labour of his hand, but a base in handicrafts is essential to every artist. It is there that the original source of creativity lies."

"A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of an authentic democracy."

"Art itself cannot be taught, but craftsmanship can."

"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."

"In architectural education the teaching of a method of approach is more important than the teaching of skills… the integration of the whole range of knowledge and experience is of the greatest importance right from the start; only then will the totality of aspect make sense in the student’s mind… such an educational approach would draw the student into a creative effort to integrate simultaneously design, construction, and economy of any given task with its social ends."

"Modern man has developed a kind of Gallup-poll mentality, relying on quantity instead of quality and yielding to expediency instead of building a new faith."

"Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith."

"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."

"Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning."

"Since art is dead in the actual life of civilized nations, it has been relegated to these grotesque morgues, museums."

"We aimed at realizing standards of excellence, not creating transient novelties."

"The ultimate aim of all creative activity is a building! The decoration of buildings was once the noblest function of fine arts, and fine arts were indispensable to great architecture. Today they exist in complacent isolation, and can only be rescued by the conscious co-operation and collaboration of all craftsmen. Architects, painters, and sculptors must once again come to know and comprehend the composite character of a building, both as an entity and in terms of its various parts. Then their work will be filled with that true architectonic spirit which, as "salon art", it has lost."

"The old art schools were unable to produce this unity; and how, indeed, should they have done so, since art cannot be taught? Schools must return to the workshop. The world of the pattern-designer and applied artist, consisting only of drawing and painting must become once again a world in which things are built. If the young person who rejoices in creative activity now begins his career as in the older days by learning a craft, then the unproductive "artist" will no longer be condemned to inadequate artistry, for his skills will be preserved for the crafts in which he can achieve great things."

"Specialists are people who always repeat the same mistakes."