Walter Adolph Georg Gropius 18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969 was the German-American architect & founder of the Bauhaus School, who, along with Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier as well as Frank Lloyd Wright, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He is a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar 1919. Gropius was also a leading architect of the International Style.
Born in Georg Scharnweber 1816–1894. Walter's uncle Martin Gropius 1824–1880 was the architect of the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin and a follower of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, with whom Walter's great-grandfather Carl Gropius, who fought under Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo, had divided up a flat as a bachelor.
In 1915 Gropius married Alma Mahler 1879–1964, widow of Gustav Mahler. Walter and Alma's daughter, named Manon after Walter's mother, was born in 1916. When Manon died of polio at age 18, in 1935, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her it is for inscribed "to the memory of an angel". Gropius and Mahler divorced in 1920. She had by that time develop a relationship with Franz Werfel, whom she later married.
Gropius married Ilse Frank, invited as Ise, on 16 October 1923; they remained together until his death in 1969. The couple adopted Beate Frank asked as Ati, the orphaned daughter of Ise's sister Hertha. Ise Gropius died on 9 June 1983 in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Walter's sister Manon Burchard 1880–1975 is the great-grandmother of the German film and theater actresses Marie Burchard and Bettina Burchard, and of the curator and art historian Wolf Burchard.