The Gropius House is a historic house museum at 68 Baker Bridge Road in Lincoln, Massachusetts, United States. Designed by Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and his partner Marcel Breuer in the modern style, the two-story, wood-frame structure was completed in 1938. The house was originally the residence of Gropius, his wife Ise (), and their daughter Ati. It occupies the center of a hill on an approximately property. Its materials and architectural details, though modernist and relatively simple, were intended to evoke similarities to other New England buildings. Operated by Historic New England since 1985, the house includes a collection of Bauhaus-related items. The design, an early example of modernist residential architecture in the eastern United States, has received extensive commentary on its juxtaposition of traditional and modernist design elements. The building is designated a National Historic Landmark and is part of the Woods End Road Historic District.
The site is extensively landscaped with retaining walls and plantings—which Gropius intended would integrate the building's architecture with the surrounding landscape—and also includes a garage. The house spans approximately , with a largely rectangular massing. The facade is made of vertical wooden planks interspersed with casement windows and sash windows. The exterior incorporates elements such as a spiral staircase, an entrance marquee, a rear porch, and protruding trellises. There is a second-story outdoor deck and a partially-enclosed flat roof. The interior spaces are grouped around a central stair hall, and they are decorated with furniture from the Gropius family's previous homes, along with objects acquired by or donated to the family. The first story has a study, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, and maid's room. The second story contains three bedrooms and partially overhangs the first story.
Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus art school, fled Nazi Germany in 1934 and settled in the US in 1937. Initially, the family rented properties around Boston before deciding to construct a home in Lincoln. Gropius obtained land and financing from the philanthropist Helen Storrow. A local contractor, Casper J. Jenney, built the house between March and September 1938. The home attracted attention for its modernist design and was often used by Gropius's students and guests. Though Ati moved out during the 1940s, Walter lived at the Gropius House until his death in 1969. Ise donated the property to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA; later Historic New England) by 1975. After Ise died in 1983, the building opened as a historic house museum on June 1, 1985, and has undergone multiple restorations since then.
Site The Gropius House is located in the Boston suburbs at 68 Baker Bridge Road in Lincoln, Massachusetts, United States, about from Boston itself. It was built between 1938 and 1939 by the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius for his family. The plot overlooks wetlands to the southeast, woods to the south (behind the house), and Mounts Wachusett and Monadnock to the west; nearby trees obstruct direct views of Mount Wachusett from the house's second floor. The surrounding area is sparsely developed due to the presence of numerous preservation easements and privately-owned lands. The Gropius House and four 1930s-era houses to the west—designed by Gropius and his associates Marcel Breuer and Walter Bogner—are part of the Woods End Road Historic District. Trees are planted between the Gropius House and the Ford House, another building in that district, which neighbors the Gropius House to the southwest. The Codman House is also located nearby.
The site covers about . The house is situated on a hill at the center of the property; in contrast to other houses in New England, it is not oriented parallel to a lot line. A gravel driveway ascends the hill, leading to a cul-de-sac, or dead end, outside the house's entrance. A garage, later used as a visitor center, was also designed for the grounds. It was placed northeast of the house, at the bottom of the hill. The garage's location had been suggested by the previous landowner, Helen Storrow, who said a garage further up the hill would be inconvenient to access after a snowstorm. This garage can fit two cars and has a shed roof. Like the main house, the garage has a facade made of white-painted redwood. Behind the retractable garage doors are glass openings for the exhibits, gift shop, and ticket booth. When the house became a museum, a port-a-potty was placed next to the garage. By 2026, the port-a-potty was planned to be replaced with a permanent rectangular structure clad in fieldstone, facing away from the driveway.
Landscape design Gropius carefully curated the grounds, working with his wife Ise. One writer described the house as having been planned "as an organic part of the landscape", and even the house's orientation and precise location were selected only after significant consideration. The site of the Gropius House previously included 90 apple trees, which were arranged at the base of a hill. The top of the hill was truncated when the house was built, and although some of the orchard's trees were relocated, the landscape work generally sought to minimize disturbances to the orchard. The different parts of the landscape were intended to blend into each other, and the plantings were arranged so they did not create full boundaries. Architectural features such as a protruding rear porch (see ) and large windows were included to integrate the house with the landscape. This use of organic architectural design was similar to what Eleanor Raymond had done for her sister in nearby Belmont, Massachusetts. One commentator described the land around the building as an "intermediary space" linking the building to its surroundings.
Retaining walls, similar to those used elsewhere in New England, are used throughout the grounds. These walls use local material, being, as the historian Kevin Murphy put it, "of the land". The house is positioned behind a fieldstone retaining wall along Baker Bridge Road to the north, which predates the building's construction. Another preexisting retaining wall to the south also remains in place. When the house was built, Gropius added flagstone retaining walls to the west and south, topped with mortar to make it easier to mow. To the east, a bench was added onto part of an existing retaining wall. The retaining walls are not all connected to each other. At the perimeter of the property, the landscape blends in with the plantings surrounding it.
Some parts of the site were excavated, then planted with grass. The grass near the house was cut short, but grass further out was allowed to grow taller. Different plantings were selected for different architectural elements. For example, the entrance has yucca and daylilies; the house's trellises have pink roses; and vertical design elements have American bittersweets and Concord grapevines. The rear porch divides the lawn into two sections of each. There is an oak tree west of the house; it was placed on axis with the building's chimney and a column at one of the building's corners, visually creating a colonnade. Just south of the porch is a pair of columns, which virtually "framed" the landscape as seen from the porch. After a trip to Japan in the 1950s, Ise removed the perennials and covered the ground in a layer of gravel, where she planted azaleas, candytuft, cotoneaster, and one large red-leafed Japanese maple tree.
Architecture
Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer's architectural partnership designed the house for Gropius's family in a modern style. It was the first structure ever completed by their firm and the first project Gropius designed in the U.S. Breuer, despite being significantly involved in the design, did not take credit for it. Gropius's wife Ise and daughter Ati suggested many elements that were used in the final design, such as the exterior spiral staircase; because of their exacting requirements, Gropius called them "the toughest customers" he had ever had. In keeping with Gropius's Bauhaus design philosophy, the plans and materials were relatively simple. The design was made as functional as possible, incorporating no purely-esthetic elements, and Gropius even avoided excessive color because he thought it was ostentatious. The house's architecture was also intended to take advantage of the views, along with the shadows cast by the nearby trees.
The house uses a hybrid of traditional and modern principles and materials. It incorporates Bauhaus design elements and principles extensively, such as strip windows and free-flowing interior spaces. Other design elements such as the porch, along with materials such as the wood facade, were commonplace in the vernacular architecture of New England; Gropius hoped the use of these details would make the Bauhaus movement more acceptable to the American public. Traditional materials, such as wood, brick, and fieldstone, were used alongside more modern industrial materials, such as glass block, acoustic plaster, welded steel, and chrome banisters. Gropius later said he had been inspired by the design and planning of New England towns, saying, "They had a conception of a totality: a [town] common in the center and every house a little bit different." To save money, and to demonstrate that regular Americans could construct similarly-distinctive designs, Gropius constructed his house almost entirely of materials and fixtures that were readily available in stores or in catalogs; many of these items were made in factories or were more suitable for industrial settings. Only the interior stair's rail and outdoor lighting were custom-made. The architectural writer Robert Campbell said the use of readily-available materials was intended to make it "free from ego", as though it were assembled rather than designed.
The arrangement and design details are more akin to European precedents, including an asymmetrical Bauhaus building Gropius and Breuer had designed in 1926. They bear close similarities to an idealistic house Gropius had written about in a 1931 article for Architectural Forum magazine. In that article, he proposed a dwelling of "light construction", with a free-flowing interior in which rooms were positioned according to their function. Gropius had believed that buildings should not conform to "artificial symmetry", and other Bauhaus buildings had generally been designed without symmetry in mind. The exterior materials, as well, conformed with the principles that Gropius had espoused in the 1931 article. The design was also adapted to New England's climate; for example, the materials and layout were intended to allow the house to be passively heated during the winter. The house's wood frame was intended to pay homage to New England's older architecture. The Gropius House thus contrasted with other modernist buildings, which were often steel or concrete-framed, and with other buildings in Gropius's native Germany, which were frequently made of brick.
Exterior