WALTER P. PAEPCKE Biography - Bussiness people and enterpreneurs

 
 

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WALTER P. PAEPCKE

Name: Walter Paepcke                                                                 
Birn: 1896                                                                           
Died: 1960                                                                           
                                                                                       
Walter Paepcke (1896-1960) was a U.S. industrialist and philanthropist prominent     
in the middle-20th century.                                                           
                                                                                       
A longtime executive of the Chicago-based Container Corporation of America,           
Paepcke is best noted for his founding of the Aspen Institute and the Aspen           
Skiing Company in the early 1950s, both of which helped transform the town of         
Aspen, Colorado into an international resort destination and popularize the           
sport of skiing in the United States.                                                 
                                                                                       
In 1949 Paepcke made Aspen the site for a celebration of the 200th birthday of       
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Albert Schweitzer, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Thornton         
Wilder, and Artur Rubinstein all attended the celebration. The next year,             
Paepcke created what is now the Aspen Institute.                                     
                                                                                       
Paepcke hired Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer and brought him to Aspen to promote     
the project through poster design and other design work; Paepcke was also the         
patron of fellow Bauhaus figure László Moholy-Nagy by financing the re-birth of     
the American New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1939.The New Bauhaus also had links to         
the Armour Institute of Technology.