History

In 1910, Karl Benscheidt established the Fagus-Werk to manufacture shoe lasts — the wooden forms used by cobblers to shape shoes. His factory site in Alfeld already had a design from Eduard Werner, a local architect working in the conventional historicist style. Benscheidt rejected it and sought someone who could give his progressive business a progressive building. He found Walter Gropius through the architect Hermann Muthesius.

Gropius had just spent three years in Peter Behrens’s Berlin office — the same office that had simultaneously employed Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, making it perhaps the most consequential architectural atelier of the 20th century. From Behrens he absorbed the idea of a total design philosophy that embraced industrial production. But where Behrens’s buildings remained rooted in classical structure, Gropius pushed further: at Alfeld, he used the existing Werner design’s structural framework as a starting point and then stripped it of everything decorative, replacing solid masonry infill with continuous glass panels and, crucially, carrying the glass around the corners without any structural support.

The glass corner was the decisive innovation. In all previous construction, the corner of a building required a structural pier — stone, brick, or concrete — to carry the load at the angle. Gropius transferred the structural load to the piers set back from the corner, allowing the glass to wrap continuously around the building’s edge. The result was a building that appeared to have no solid corners at all: the facade became pure transparency, a screen rather than a wall.

The factory opened in 1913 and has operated continuously ever since. The Fagus-Werk GmbH still manufactures shoe lasts on the same site — making it the rare case of an architectural monument that is also a living, functioning industrial building. Gropius went on to found the Bauhaus in 1919; the principles of the Fagus Factory — transparency, the rejection of applied ornament, the expression of industrial production — became the foundation of that institution and, through it, of almost all subsequent modern architecture.