Fotoeins Fotografie

Before Bauhaus found its first footing in Weimar, there was in the town of Alfeld in central Germany the Fagus-Werk factory building.

The Fagus factory building is looked upon as the first building in the world for the modern architectural age, and is the predecessor to the elegant 1926 Bauhaus headquarters building in Dessau. Fagus company founder Karl Benscheidt commissioned architect and future Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius, to create and build a shoe-making factory as an artistic project. Gropius and his collaborator Adolf Meyer stuck with working floor-plans by architect Eduard Werner, and set their sights on new exterior and interior designs. Completed in 1911, the factory’s office building set a new standard for 20th-century industrial architecture with steel and glass construction and tall unsupported windows at the corners of the building.

“Fagus” is Latin for “beech tree”, and shoemaking began with shoe lasts or moulds constructed from beech wood, which were sold and distributed around the world to other companies for the productions of shoes. In the 1920s, Benscheidt developed the turning precision-lathe speeding up production, prompting growth and expansion and elevating the company to world’s top producer of shoe lasts. Today, the building is still a working factory: Fagus creates plastic lasts milled by automated machinery to precise specifications for specific designs by shoe companies. Also on-site is GreCon which produces systems for fire-detection and fire-extinguishing in industrial settings. The Fagus factory building was recognized as “unique living monument” and inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage Site (Welterbe) in 2011.

With a population of over 20-thousand people, Alfeld is located in the German federal state of Lower Saxony. The town’s reach by train is 30-minutes from Hannover or 40-minutes from Göttingen, after which is a short 5- to 10-minute walk from Alfeld(Leine)¹ train station to the entrance of the Fagus/GreCon complex. Visitors can walk around the working factory site, stop at the World Heritage Site Visitor Centre, sit in the neighbouring café for coffee or tea, and visit the museum dedicated to the building’s origins, the building’s century-long history of shoe-making, and a general history of footwear.

Walter Gropius and others would move to Weimar to establish a centre of art, design, thought, and attitude for Bauhaus in 1919, eight years after inauguration of the Fagus-Werk.

Die Baukunst soll ein Spiegel des Lebens und der Zeit sein.
(Architecture should be a mirror to life and its time.)

– Walter Gropius.

Direction signage at Alfeld(Leine) train station.

Front entrance.

The factory’s office building.

Rear of complex facing west, left-to-right: office building; boiler house and smokestack; chip storehouse, now the World Heritage Visitor Centre.

The Visitor Centre is housed in the former chip storehouse. Next to the rail tracks is the former weigh station whose location is marked by an arrow.

Office building: steel and glass construction with unsupported corners.

Pencil sketches of skeletal structure of foot from a workbook (replica) with 1871-1879 stamps from “Erfurter Fachschule für die Schuh-Industrie und Leisten-Branche” (Erfurt Technical School).

Shoe lasts and fillers: brown beech wood, green polyethylene.

Shoe lasts (moulds) produced at Fagus: MEXX Karree Trotteur (rectangular loafer), BOSS Sportschuh-Typ (sports shoe).

These Ecco shoes for fall and winter 2018 were manufactured using shoe lasts or moulds produced at Fagus.

Parting shot.

¹ With a check in early-January 2019, hourly Metronome Regional Express trains between Hannover and Göttingen stop in both directions at Alfeld. The town’s train station is labelled “Alfeld(Leine)” for its proximity to the Leine river. Don’t confuse this Alfeld with another town by the name of Alfeld located in north-central Bavaria.

I made the photos above on 28 September 2017; alle Fotoaufnahmen sind mit Wasserzeichen versehen worden. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins.com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-aTn.