Architecture and History in Germany

Just in time for the company’s centennial anniversary, a shoe-last factory built in 1911 in Alfeld in Lower Saxony by the future Bauhaus director Walter Gropius (1883-1969), has been added by UNESCO to its list of cultural and natural World Heritage sites. The Bauhaus Archive in Berlin is exhibiting Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photographs of the Fagus-Werk for the occasion.

The Fagus GmbH factory, located 40 km south of Hannover is a key work of modernity in Germany. With their very first commission, the architect Walter Gropius, 27 years old at the time, and his assistant Adolf Meyer set a new direction in style.

The university dropout and his twenty-five years older client Carl Benscheidt, a self-made man of humble origins who had set up his own business, shared an awareness of the urgent social problems of their times: in their view the work world was in need of reform carried out according to ethical and aesthetic considerations.

Building palaces for work

Walter Gropius put it this way in 1911: “Palaces must be built for work that enable the workers to feel something of the dignity of the shared, common idea.” And further: “Far-sighted organisers have recognised that with the individual worker’s contentment, the overall work spirit and consequently plant productivity increase.”














Carl Benscheidt not only wanted a factory where well-trained workers from the region could fully develop their skills, he also recognised the marketing effect of the steel and glass facade sketched by Gropius: the factory stood right next to the railway line between Hannover and Kassel, “and such an exemplary building,” thus Benscheidt in a letter to Gropius, “can also serve as good advertising at the same time.” He therefore commissioned the Berliners to develop a new concept for the facade – Eduard Werner of Hannover, who had planned the building up to this point, was tasked with the construction.

Icons of "New Construction"

In retrospect, Carl Benscheidt showed excellent intuition with his faith in Gropius’ modern concept of architecture: 15 years before the Bauhaus Dessau (1925-1926), the factory was the advance manifesto of the “New Objectivity.” The buildings were laid out in accordance with the production process that a shoe-last passed through from delivery of the raw material – wood - to completion: a saw mill, storage depot, drying house and production hall.


















While the other buildings of this industrial complex, built in three construction phases from 1911 to 1925, are completely adapted to their respective functions – the storage depot is a solid stone building, the production hall with its large glass windows offers ideal lighting for shoe-last production – the three-storey main building of the “Fagus” became an icon of modernity and the transparency it advocated. Its unsupported, fully glassed-in corners represented a departure from Industrial Classicism and mark the beginnings of modern skeleton construction. Gropius and Meyer, who had even the construction site regularly documented by one of the most prominent architectural photographers of the time, contributed to the canonisation of their debut work from the very beginning.

Albert Renger-Patzsch and Fagus

Commissioned by Carl Benscheidt Jr., Albert Renger-Patzsch, one of the most important representatives of the “New Objectivity,” photographed the Fagus factory in 1928: among his photographs, which were composed down to the last detail, photo no. 16 became the most famous, apart from “Shoemaking Irons” and his portraits of the firm’s owners. Photo no. 16 shows the glassed-in corner of the main building in the dramatically hard light of the afternoon sun, and Gropius used it to the end of his days as a testament to the "fundamental principles of the new architecture": he found a new photo, taken in 1952 and identical except for the lighting conditions, unconvincing.
The Bauhaus Archive presented the two series - which document both the architecture as well as the products and their production process – in the exhibition “modernity in focus: Albert Renger-Patzsch photographs the Fagus factory. A German-English catalogue accompanying the exhibition has also been issued.

Historical monument status since 1946

Unlike many other World Cultural Heritage sites, the Fagus factory, registered as a historical monument since 1946, is still in operation today, and shoe-lasts are still being produced there – even if no longer from beech-wood (Lat. fagus), but from frog-green plastic. Measurement and fire protection systems as well as woodworking machines have been supplementing production since 1974.

From 1982 to 2001, the factory was lavishly restored in a total of 15 construction phases by the Hamburg architect Wilfried Köhnemann for the equivalent of 6.67 million euros. The founder’s great-grandsons, Gerd und Ernst Greten, contributed about half of this sum as their investment share. In addition, within the context of the landmark-appropriate restoration, they set up a museum area that is open to the public in which Benscheidt’s and Gropius’ pioneering achievements are documented in a permanent exhibition.