Architects, sculptors painters, we all must return to the crafts! For art is not a 'profession.' There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman.

— Walter Gropius

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

— Walter Gropius

Good architecture should be a projection of life itself, and that implies an intimate knowledge of biological, social, technical, and artistic problems.

— Walter Gropius

How can we expect our students to become bold and fearless in thought and action if we encase them in sentimental shrines feigning a culture which has long since disappeared?

— Walter Gropius

I cannot imagine myself fitting into the existing curriculum. I am too self-willed for that and have had my own very definite ideas for a long time, very different from the existing ways, as to how architecture is to be taught.

— Walter Gropius

Let us together create the new building of the future, which will be everything in one form: architecture and sculpture and painting.

— Walter Gropius

Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.

— Walter Gropius

Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.

— Walter Gropius

Proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the prime source of creative imagination. Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist!

— Walter Gropius

Society needs a good image of itself. That is the job of the architect.

— Walter Gropius