Following his own request that "all my friends of the present and of the past would get together in a little while for a fiesta--a la Bauhaus, " woo of those close friends gathered at the offices of Architects Collaborative in Cambridge yesterday afternoon. The man they met to remember--for they did not meet "To commemorate" and certainly not "to mourn"--was Walter A. Gropius, head of the Department of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design from 1937 to 1952.

Gropius, one of the nation's leading architects, died at the Tifts-New England Medical Center last Saturday as the result of complications following surgery undergone to replace the aortic valve of his heart.

In thanking his assembled friends, his wife Ise told them that prior to the operation. Grope--the name by which they knew him -- had only asked of himself one question: "I've had so much of life, should I ask for more?"

And so too the emphasis at the Fiesta was on life. Alex Cvijanovic, a Principal of Architects Collaborative, the firm Gropius founder after retiring from Harvard, read from Gropius' testament.

In part it went:

Cremate me, but ask not for the ashes.

The piety for cinders is a half-way thing.

Out with it.

Wear no signs of mourning.

It would be beautiful if all my friends of the present and of the past would get together in a little while for a fiesta--a la Bauhaus--drinking, laughing, loving.

Then I shall surely join in, more than in life. It is more fruitful than the graveyard oratory.

Love is of the essence.

Love is of the essence.

For, even in the ceremonial and defiantly mechanistic process of death, Groius left those who followed him with a purpose, or perhaps, more precisely, a sentiment, an emotion. And more importantly, he left them its appropriate form.

For many others, Gropius left a thousand possibilities, none of which can now be lost, all captured in the name he popularized, Bauhaus. Established in 1919 in Weimar and moved to Dessau in 1925, the Bauhaus School of Design was the first major attempt to unite art with industry and daily life.