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.
Our time in the American Southwest was much more than the extensive drives, more than the 3100 miles accumulated on the road. We were eager to sample the food, and specifically, the sustained burst of heat from red and green chiles famously represented in New Mexico. The following are some of our favourite flavours with visual reasons why we were not disappointed and why we want to go back.
Above/featured: Classical Gas Museum: Embudo, NM – 11 Oct 2018 (X70).
I wrote previously about our time (in autumn 2018) driving through parts of the American Southwest where I also gave more “shutter workout” to my Fujifilm X70 compact mirrorless camera.
We’d seen an abundance and variety of colours throughout our journey, and upon return, I asked myself from what we had witnessed if there were sufficient examples to show. What follows below are sets of images from Arizona and New Mexico, with colours distributed throughout the “ROYGBIV spectrum”: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.
Above/featured: Image still from “Bully for Bugs” (originally, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1952).
Something is burrowing through the desert when a creature pops up through a hole in the dirt. A grey rabbit stands, brushing himself off and looking at his surroundings. Realizing he’s not where he should be, he checks his map and says aloud with mild irritation:
I knew I should’ve taken that left turn at Albuquerque.
That Bugs Bunny statement is a frequently used gag in a number of Warner Brothers cartoons. But in all seriousness, it is a very specific geographical reference. What does Bugs mean by “that left turn?” Is it a real thing?
Let’s go to New Mexico in the American Southwest, to Albuquerque, whose modern development has been shaped by the car and high-speed roads. The city’s history is tied with the creation of the American highway and one of the most well-known: US route 66.
After the 1937 realignment of highway US route-66, Albuquerque’s Central Avenue became the east-west “Mother Road” through the city. Driving west on Central Avenue towards the city’s Old Town district, the road bends slightly right and northwest to run parallel with the Rio Grande river. The road eventually comes up to a junction, and drivers are faced with choices at the intersection of what are now Central Avenue and Rio Grande Boulevard.
• Turn right, and drivers are headed away from US-66, northbound towards Santa Fe.
• Jig slightly left, and drivers continue westbound on US-66 towards Arizona and beyond to the highway’s western terminus in Los Angeles, California.
John Deeth also wrote about the “left turn” in August 2011.
Instead of merely complaining about a desire to carry something lighter for day-to-day photography situations, I decided to do something about it a couple of weeks before my month-long visit to Austria in May 2018.
I looked online for a mirrorless compact camera, but I didn’t need the latest or a top-line model. I preferred an older model with a lot of online reviews and user comments, and I decided on a compromise among three criteria: cost, weight and size, and image quality.
Fotoeins Fotografie 