Walter Gropius was a pioneering German architect and founder of the influential Bauhaus school. He studied architecture in the early 1900s and worked under influential architects before founding the Bauhaus in 1919. In the late 1930s, Gropius emigrated to the United States and became a professor at Harvard. For his family home built in 1938 in Lincoln, Massachusetts, Gropius combined elements of New England architecture with his modernist regionalist approach, creating a cubic house with a flat roof, large windows, and smooth surfaces while retaining regional redwood construction.