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The following translation of Walter Gropius’ International Architecture (1925) is adapted from Kenneth W. Kaiser’s 1964 translation for his thesis at MIT. It is, to date, the only translation of the brief text which accompanies the photos and plans featured in the volume. All the images and pages reproduced here come from scans uploaded over at the excellent Monoskop archive. Here’s the full-text PDF of Gropius’ groundbreaking Internationale Architektur.

Further on, directly after the translation, there’s the original German text. Quite short,though not quite Miesian in its brevity. Of course, Gropius openly admits that the book’s primary function was intended to be visual. Enjoy!

International Architecture

Walter Gropius
Bauhaus Books 1
Weimar, 1925

Foreword

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International Architecture is a picture book of the modern art of building. It will in concise form give a survey of the works of the leading modern architects of the cultured countries of the world and make the developments of today’s architectural design familiar.¹

The works pictured on the following pages carry beside their differing individual and national characteristics, common features that are the same for all countries. This relationship, which every layman can observe, is a sign of great significance for the future, foretelling a general will-to-form of a fundamentally new kind represented in all the cultured countries.

In the recent past the art of building sank into sentimental decorative conceptions of the aesthete,, whose goal was the outward display of motives, ornaments, and profiles taken mostly from past cultures, which were without essential importance to the body of the building. The building became depreciated as a carrier of superficial, dead decoration, instead of being a living organism. The indispensable connection with advancing technology (and its new materials and construction methods) was lost in this are many for each building problem — the creative artist, within the boundaries his time sets upon him, chooses according to his personal sensibilities. The work therefore carries the signature of its creator. But it is wrong to infer from this the necessity for emphasis on the individual at any cost. On the contrary, the will to develop a unified world picture, the will which characterizes our age, presupposes the longing to liberate spiritual values from their confinement to the individual and to elevate them to objective importance. Then the unity of the arts, which leads to culture, will follow by itself. Continue reading →