Projects by Name

Black Mountain College was an experimental undergraduate institution with an emphasis on arts education. It had strong ties to the Bauhaus through professors such as Josef and Anni Albers and Alber's former student, Xanti Schawinsky. In 1939, Theodore Dreier, one of the founders of the school, approached Gropius and Breuer about designing buildings for a new campus at Lake Eden. Gropius and Breuer envisioned a series of buildings - including a "study" building, an auditorium, laboratories and dormitories - scattered around the edge of the lake. The buildings would have steel-frame structures with walls of painted brick or fieldstone. The main study building was a long, thin, four-story construction bent in the middle and supported by two rows of pilotis, one of which stood in the lake. The roof functioned as a sun terrace with a parabolic wall for protection from the wind, possibly inspired by Le Corbusier's roof gardens. Professors' studies were interspersed among those for the students. The professors had their own apartments, but the students shared sleeping quarters. The Museum of Modern Art exhibited Gropius and Breuer's plans in order to raise money for the construction, but the outbreak of war caused the college to abandon their plans. Instead, they constructed simpler buildings designed by A. Lawrence Kocher.