An Unpublished Interview with Walter Gropius, December 1960

Abstract

Having recently retired from the University of Pennsylvania's Department of City and Regional Planning, I was going through the boxes of files I had accumulated over the years, when I came upon folders containing three unpublished interviews I had done in the early 1960s. These conversations were with Reyner Banham, Walter Gropius, and Jose Luis Sert. Reading them over, I thought the Gropius interview was still worth publishing as a historical artifact, and so I contacted JSAH (Figure 1). Figure 1 Walter Gropius, 1955 (photo, Hans G. Conrad/Rene Spitz Collection). This is how the Gropius interview came about. In the summer of 1960, before returning to the Yale School of Architecture that fall, I had a job in the editorial offices of the Architectural Record . Jonnie Davern, who was effectively the managing editor (although she was not confirmed in that title until later), sent me across town to interview Philip Johnson at his office in the Seagram Building.1 Johnson was in good form and enjoyed the idea of being interviewed by someone studying to be an architect. The Record was pleased with the interview and published it that December.2 Davern gave me some additional interview assignments when I went off to New Haven that fall, expecting me to fit them in during the academic year. She commissioned the Banham interview when she found out that he was visiting Yale; other assignments sometimes required me to travel. In 1961 and 1962, the Record published my interviews with Pietro Belluschi, Edward L. Barnes, Edward D. Stone, and Paul Rudolph.3 I also submitted my interviews with Banham, Sert, and Gropius, but Emerson Goble, the editor in chief, apparently decided that the ones the Record published were enough. Walter Gropius was actually one of the first of my interview assignments. I …