People who have accessed google.com have noticed that May 18 came with one of the company’s holiday logos. If one would have placed the mouse over the logo, a message with ‘125th Birthday of Walter Gropius’ would have appeared. But who is he?

Walter Gropius is one of the most important architects of modern times, and the founder of Bauhaus. Born May 18, 1883, he was the third son of a family in which both his father and his great-uncle were architects.

In 1914 he was enlisted as a sergeant major and fought in the First World War. It was with this occasion that the master of the Grand-Ducal School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, Henry van de Velde was asked to step down. The latter proposed Gropius as his successor, and the architect was appointed in 1919. During his stay at the academy, he transformed it into Bauhaus and attracted artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.

The arrival of the Nazi regime made Gropius flee to England, under the pretext of making a temporary visit to the country. Three years later, in 1937, he moved to the United States where he settled permanently and accepted a teaching position at the Harvard School of Design.

In 1945, a year after getting his citizenship, Gropius laid the foundations of The Architect’s Collaborative, which would grow to be one of the most respected companies worldwide. Walter Gropius died in Boston in 1969. He was 86 years old, and had left the world numerous influential architectural masterpieces.

A full biography of Walter Gropius can be found here.