"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," the American poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau famously wrote in Walden, published in 1854.

One need travel only a mile from where he built his iconic one-room cabin in Massachusetts to encounter another masterpiece of deliberate living, the residence of the great architect of the Modernist period, Walter Gropius.

Born in Berlin in 1883, Gropius was instrumental in defining Modernism not simply as an aesthetic movement but also as a design philosophy capable of uniting the benefits of industrial production and manual craftsmanship. This he achieved largely through his teachings at the Bauhaus, the legendary school he founded in Weimar, Germany, between the two World Wars.

Although judiciousness of means was a central tenet of the Bauhaus philosophy, it was not only for doctrinal reasons that the Gropius House was built with extreme economy. The Gropiuses arrived in the United States with little money, having abandoned Germany to flee the Nazi regime.

Lured to Massachusetts in 1937 by the offer of the chair of architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Gropius relocated with his wife, Ise, and their young daughter, Ati.

He was immediately confronted by the question of where to settle. "We rented a house near one of the lakes," Ise writes in a brief 1977 memoir on the origins of the residence. "But our Bauhaus furniture looked indeed very strange in the small rooms of this prim little house of Colonial style."

Gropius was intent on designing a home for his family according to Bauhaus principles. But in 1938, obtaining a mortgage for a flat-roofed house was an unlikely proposition.