The way his birthday was always marked by a round of imaginative celebrations illustrates the esteem in which the mentor was held by his students and colleagues. Gropius was a driving force behind the “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity). Like his own teacher Peter Behrens, he played the role of a design manager, before the concept really existed. He knew how to exploit the potential of events like the opening of a Bauhaus building in Dessau in 1926. Among his own product designs, which were actually not at all numerous, the cylindrical door-handle 1102 (1922) has come to acquire iconic status. By contrast, his “Einheitsmöbel”, a set of  standardized furniture created in 1929 for a Berlin department store, has sunk into oblivion even though it anticipated in striking detail some of the universal concepts of the 1950s propagated by Michael Bayer, Herbert Hirche, Peter Raacke and others. Gropius emigrated to London in 1934 where he was head designer at the Isokon furniture company for three years, while also working on his own furniture projects, before moving on to the United States. In American exile Gropius gained enormous fame with his building projects. Alongside Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe he became the majordomo among the architects of his generation. The tea service TAC 1(1969 for Rosenthal) is a late one-off of exceptional coherence.