Walter Gropius began his architectural studies at the Technical University of Munich and later continued at the University of Charlottenburg-Berlin, which he left without a degree in 1908. In the same year, he joined the office of Peter Behrens and worked there with other up-and-coming architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Dietrich Marcks.

After two years with Behrens, Gropius founded his own architectural and industrial design practice in 1910. During this time he designed wallpaper, mass-produced interiors, car bodies and even a diesel locomotive.

The Fagus factory in Alfeld an der Leine, which he designed together with Adolf Meyer, became his first major architectural work. The factory building with its transparent façade of steel and glass is considered a forerunner of the movement later known as "Modern Architecture", which eventually gave rise to "New Building" or "New Objectivity" in the 1920s. The Fagus factory was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in June 2011.

After the First World War, Gropius became a founding member of the Bauhaus. In 1919, he took over the direction of the Grand Ducal Saxon College of Fine Arts in Weimar and renamed it the "State Bauhaus in Weimar". Gropius was director in Weimar until 1926 and then in Dessau. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe followed him as director and led the Bauhaus until its closure in 1933. Due to a smear campaign by the National Socialists, who defamed the Bauhaus as a "Marxist church", Gropius emigrated to England in 1934. In 1937, he moved to Cambridge, USA, where he became a professor of architecture at Harvard University.