Art: The Lawgiver

Acknowledged shrine of modern architecture was the famed Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany, and Architect Walter Gropius was its high priest. The boxy building with flat roofs and ribbon-glass windows that Gropius built there in 1926 laid down the line architecture was to follow for the next three decades. An exile from Hitler’s Germany, Gropius introduced his methods as chairman of Harvard’s department of architecture, revolutionized architecture in the U.S., became so firmly planted in architectural history that people were sometimes amazed to find him still a part of the present.

But today, at 76, seven years after his retirement from Harvard, Gropius has launched into a new burst of creativity. The Architects Collaborative (TAG), a group of keen younger architects he gathered around him at his Cambridge, Mass. headquarters, has all the commissions it can handle. The old Lawgiver has displayed an unexpected flexibility in design. “I was possibly too Puritan,” he reflects. “Too much storming against the old traditions. Now I have, with the same conceptions, I hope, a more subtle, more delicate expression.”

Tigris in the Gardens. Prime case in point is Gropius’ new plan for Iraq’s University of Baghdad. The $70 million project seemed a lost cause when General Abdul Karim Kassem swept to power last summer. Never one to give up easily, Gropius last January flew to Baghdad himself with plans and models, found, to his relief, that Premier Kassem was enthusiastic.* Kassem’s only cavil: the university was not big enough. Gropius promptly agreed to increase the size by one-third (from 8,000 to 12,000 students).

Nothing could look less like stripped-down Bauhaus architecture than Gropius’ exuberant plans for Baghdad. The university, divided into colleges, is gathered in clusters of air-conditioned buildings, set close together to provide shade in the blistering 120° summer heat. Concrete shells will cover the combined theater auditorium and mosque. Water from the nearby Tigris will splash in garden courts.

Working with TAG, which operates on an equal-partner basis but assigns one architect as job captain to each project, Gropius is also kept busy with a new synagogue in Baltimore, the U.S. embassy in Athens, and is acting as a consultant on Manhattan’s $100 million, octagon-shaped Grand Central City—a massive, 55-story structure adjacent to Grand Central Station, which will be the world’s largest commercial office structure.

“Technical Dam-Burst.” Taking time out this week, Gropius will go to New Orleans to receive the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the profession’s highest award, given in the past to such men as Louis Henri Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. It will also give Gropius a chance to get some long-brooding concerns off his chest. Says Gropius: “We have now amassed such a tremendous arsenal of techniques that their bristling display has nearly robbed us of our sense of balance.”

He recalls that when he arrived in the U.S. 22 years ago, “it was still possible in Massachusetts to squelch an unusual proposal with the words, -‘It isn’t done.’ No such code exists today; everything can be done and, most certainly, is being done. Our cities have taken on the look of a free-for-all … All sense of propriety and discrimination seems to have been swept away by this unlimited technical dam-burst.” Warns the man who had a major hand in releasing that dam-burst: “The whole population must develop a sense of beauty, a sense of the eye.”

* Not so lucky was the late Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Tigris island opera-house project (TIME, May 19, 1958) died with King Feisal.