Walter Gropius not only taught at Weimar Germany's Bauhaus, he even designed the building in Dessau. His Fagus Shoe Factory Design in Germany and his work at the Bauhaus influenced an entire generation of Modern Architects. Eventually he found himself in the United States, designing houses with old colleague Marcel Breuer, teaching at Harvard University and designing the occasional megastructure such as the Pan Am Building atop Park Avenue in New York City.

Fagus Shoe Factory
(1911) Alfeld an der Leine, Germany

The Fagus Shoe Factory became more than just a shoe factory. A truly modern building designed by one of the forerunners of Modernism, it introduced all those things (like an industrial based design aesthetic) we now take for granted.

Click here to learn all about the Fagus Shoe Factory. If you can't read German then maybe you won't be learning as much as just absorbing what you can and looking at all the pretty pictures

Bauhaus
(1926) Dessau, Germany

Walter Gropius was part of an all star Bauhaus staff (including Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky, among others) during the height of Germany's (artistic) glory days between those consecutive, destructive World Wars. Gropius was so integral to the Bauhaus that he was the one who designed their building in Dessau, it opened in 1926 and stayed open until it was forced to close (for all the obvious political reasons) in 1933.

Click here to learn more than you probably wanted to about the Bauhaus, Dessau and all those legends who once taught there