Fiona MacCarthy was the author of William Morris: A Life for Our Time, winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the Writers’ Guild Nonfiction Award, and the well-received Byron: Life and Legend. A former design correspondent for The Guardian and architecture critic for The Observer, she curated exhibits at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London. MacCarthy was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Senior Fellow at the Royal College of Art.
A riveting book about a man who nurtured a vastly ambitious project
through extraordinary times.
*The Economist*
A comprehensive biography of the figure whom the painter Paul Klee,
a teacher at the Bauhaus, called ‘the silver prince.’
*New Yorker*
MacCarthy transforms [Gropius] from a dull institutionalist—head of
the Bauhaus and, later, prominent professor at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design—into a stylistic rebel who lived and loved in an
exuberant community of artist outcasts that would be scattered
across the world after Weimar Germany became the Third Reich.
Whereas critics of the Bauhaus have seen it as the harbinger of
giant faceless office towers and superhighways slicing through
cities, MacCarthy presents the school as a fount of idealism: both
an artistic collective, surging with creative energy, and a
political project briefly filled with the angst and élan of a lost
generation soon to be crushed by Hitler. Most of all, MacCarthy
shows that Gropius’s true legacy was the talent he nurtured in
others—I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson, Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, and
Wassily Kandinsky, to name but a few.
*New Republic*
MacCarthy’s book doesn’t claim to offer deep analysis of all of
Gropius’s or the Bauhaus’s artistic output. But, as a way of
bringing the human stories of this extraordinary phenomenon to
life, it’s hard to beat.
*The Guardian*
MacCarthy’s enjoyable biography is an impressive achievement,
finally giving us not just Gropius the architect in black and
white, but the human being in full color.
*Evening Standard*
MacCarthy makes a compelling case for the architect as an
impassioned idealist and romantic…An incredibly readable and
rounded biography and gives credit where it’s due to the formidable
women who shaped him.
*Literary Review*
[A] revelatory biography…Strikingly readable…Gropius emerges here
as a kind of obsessive, passionate genius…Transforms our
understanding of the history and significance not only of Gropius
but of the group of 1930s innovators who comprised the
movement.
*The Arts Desk*
[A] meticulously researched, balanced and brilliantly written
biography…MacCarthy refuses the often ill-researched reductionist
characterizations of Gropius as the arrogant, dour modernist.
Instead, she passionately weaves a gripping and powerful narrative
deserving of a wide audience while also making for essential
reading for anyone studying architecture and design.
*Irish Times*
A complex narrative about a complex man. Fiona MacCarthy’s richly
detailed biography of Walter Gropius, one of the twentieth
century’s most influential architects, reads like a detective
story.
*Moshe Safdie, founding principal of Moshe Safdie Architects*
Saint or sinner? Visionary or myopic? In the century since the
Bauhaus opened, its founder Walter Gropius has been lionised and
demonised. Did Gropius inspire the world’s most influential and
humane art school, or was he the evil genius of miserable
industrial culture? Fiona MacCarthy is Britain’s first and best
writer on design. She rescues Gropius’s reputation in a book full
of learning, insight, dry wit, and belief. Just like the man
himself.
*Stephen Bayley, cofounder of the Design Museum, London, and author
of Taste*
This is an absolute triumph—ideas, lives, and the dramas of the
twentieth century are woven together in a feat of storytelling. A
masterpiece.
*Edmund de Waal, ceramic artist and author of The White
Road*
MacCarthy’s lucid biography shows Gropius as a man of ideas who has
indelibly influenced how we conceive of and respond to the
environments that shape our everyday lives.
*Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander & Victoria Wiley Professor of
Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and author of
Structure as Space*
Gropius, too often dismissed as a chilly theorist, emerges in a
clearer, subtler, and far more sympathetic light from Fiona
MacCarthy’s wide-ranging and authoritative biography.
*Hilary Spurling, author of Matisse the Master*
Fiona McCarthy has helped us to see Gropius in a radically
different light. This is a very significant biography of a very
significant man.
*Sir Christopher Frayling*
MacCarthy brings insight and sensitivity to a sweeping, penetrating
life of Walter Gropius…She produces a multidimensional portrait of
a towering, complex figure…Engrossing, impressively researched, and
keenly perceptive.
*Kirkus Reviews*
[A] comprehensive portrait of the German-born architect best known
for founding the Bauhaus…MacCarthy offers a buoyant account of her
subject’s life.
*Booklist*
A luminous, vigorous study of a prodigiously gifted man driven by
singular passion.
*Hyperallergic*
MacCarthy is out to change wrong-headed perceptions in her
biography…Rather than giving us a portrait of a mechanical
architectural rationalist, she underscores Gropius’s humanity, and
how that inspired his visionary philosophy as well as the
consummate aesthetic courage he showed through an extremely
volatile, even dangerous, political age.
*Arts Fuse*
A great read, suitable for the beach, which Gropius and other
Bauhäusler loved, from the banks of the Elbe to Cape Cod… An
account of the sentimental journey of one of the most influential
architects and pedagogues of the 20th century.
*The Architect’s Newspaper*
For those craving a bit more personal insight into the life of the
notoriously uptight Walter Gropius, Fiona MacCarthy’s biography
will be sure to scratch that itch.
*The Architect’s Newspaper*
An engrossing read.
*Architectural Record*
[Gropius’s] achievements overshadow the man and it’s the great
virtue of Fiona MacCarthy’s biography to bring this austere figure
to life.
*Form*
Presents a lively portrait of this seminal figure. The book brims
with personal details…This is an enjoyable, well-written portrait
of a giant of 20th-century modernism.
*Choice*
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