Writing in the Saturday Evening Post fifty years later, Gropius explained, "We wanted out students to come to terms with the machine without sacrificing their initiative so that they might bring to mass production, to architecture and to community planning a sense of order and beauty."

The machine had arrived with its challenge. With their own individual talents, Gropius' only rivals--Le Corbusier, Wright, Mies van der Rohe--responded. But only Gropius confronted the machine with an equally imposing voice. Only he replied in terms of the mechanistic, in terms that could grasp for beauty at the same time as they captured function.

In 1937, then, when Gropius arrived at Harvard, he was an architect who could already present valid alternatives to the eclecticism that characterized, indeed more often than not plagued, American architecture. As if in response to the architectural potpourri that is Harvard between Kirkland Street and the Charles, Gropius left a unified Graduate Center complex focused on Harkness Commons.

More significantly, though, he was an educator, a man as committed to communicating through the classroom as he was to speaking through his buildings. During his tenure, the Architecture Department of the GSD became recognized as one of the major architectural centers of the world.

It was thus appropriate that the other message at his Festival was letter to a group of students, written by Gropius just five years ago, and read yesterday by another of his associates, Norman Fletcher.

"Act as if you were going to live forever and cast your plans way ahead," Gropius wrote. "If your contribution has been vital, there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off, and that will be your claim to immortality."

In fact, though, Gropius' hold on that essence seemed to be more than just metaphorical. When he founded Architects Collabortive in '52 at the age f 69, he was just beginning one of his most productive periods.

In the years that followed, he was commissioned to design the University of Baghdad and new American embassy in Athens and was selected as a consulting architect for New York's Pan American Building.

For some the Gropius myth will remain in his buildings; for others, it can be seen in his writing; and, for some, it will lie in the apocryphia that surrounds any magnetic figure.

But, for all three, the image that lingers along with the name Walter Gropius will be a measure of a personality. It is probably Gropius' greatest achievement that that personality survived the smothering mechanisms of institutions and societies while he lived. And, as his Festival demonstrated, it is not to end with his death.