62 Quotes by Walter Gropius

Good architecture should be a projection of life itself, and that implies an intimate knowledge of biological, social, technical, and artistic problems.

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.

The development of the New Architecture encountered serious obstacles at a very early stage of its development. Conflicting theories and the dogmas enunciated in architects' personal manifestos all helped to confuse the main issue.

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.

Proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the prime source of creative imagination. Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist!

The general public, formerly profoundly indifferent to everything to do with building, has been shaken out of its torpor; personal interest in architecture as something that concerns every one of us in our daily lives has been very widely aroused; and the broad line of its future development are already clearly discernible.

The mere drawing and painting world of the pattern designer and the applied artist must become a world that builds again.

The ultimate, if distant, aim of the Bauhaus is the unified work of art - the great structure - in which there is no distinction between monumental and decorative art.

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.