The Walter Gropius Home wants a brand new rest room – and it desires the general public to assist

Walter Gropius’ household house has turned heads ever because it sprang out of the Massachusetts countryside in 1938. With its glass brick partitions, ribbon home windows and daring exterior spiral staircase, it was the veritable embodiment of Gropius’ Bauhaus rules. In truth, upon its completion, some 1,000 onlookers confirmed as much as look at this architectural curiosity.

Practically 90 years later, the Gropius Home continues to draw crowds; It’s been open to the general public as a museum because the Eighties and is likely one of the hottest vacationer websites run by Historic New England, the nonprofit that maintains the five-acre property. Excursions continuously promote out.

There was, nevertheless, one factor that allow the modernist icon down: its public rest room.

For years, the one outside facility accessible to company has been a single moveable rest room that abutts the Gropius household storage, which presently features as a small customer’s centre.

‘It’s the standard-issue, off-the-truck, porta potty – it serves its goal,’ says Vin Cipolla, president and CEO of Historic New England. ‘It is unexpectedly within the spirit of the home, in a method: it is extremely practical.’

Nonetheless, Cipolla and his crew knew they may do higher. Immediately (13 November 2025), Historic New England has introduced a juried architectural competitors to design a brand new outside restroom on the Gropius Home, one which improves the customer expertise by prioritising accessibility and mixing in with the aesthetics of the positioning (very like the not too long ago added amenities at Balkrishna V Doshi’s 1959 Institute of Indology in India, for instance). Design professionals and college students alike are inspired to enter, as are interdisciplinary groups throughout structure, panorama and industrial design.

‘The concept of inviting the design neighborhood into the dialog felt very compelling to us,’ Cipolla says. ‘It is too cool a chance to surrender.’

Gropius and his second spouse, Ise, moved to the US in 1937 after the architect accepted a educating place at Harvard. By then, the Bauhaus college he had based had been shuttered by the Nazis, who deemed his teachings as degenerate.