Walter Gropius: visionary founder of the Bauhaus (Main)

Bauhaus was more than an art school - it was the birth of a new way of thinking.

In this majestic biography of its charismatic founder, Fiona MacCarthy argues that Walter Gropius's visionary ideas still influence the way we live, work, and think today.

MacCarthy traces the story of this ground-breaking architect: his shattering experiences in World War I, his turbulent relationship with Alma Mahler, his concept of the Bauhaus as a gathering of talents that included Kandinsky, Klee and Moholy-Nagy, and his agonised decision to leave Nazi Germany in 1933 for a new life first in England, than in America.

This modern reassessment of Gropius' life is biography at its finest and most vivid.