Niedersachsen | Fotoeins Fotografie

Nationalpark Schleswig-Holsteinisches Wattenmeer, Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea National Park, UNESCO World Heritage Site, Wattenmeer, Wadden Sea, Elbe river, Cuxhaven, Niedersachsen, Lower Saxony, Germany, Deutschland, fotoeins.com

Fotoeins Friday: RTW10, fifty-four

10 years ago, I began an around-the-world (RTW) journey lasting 389 consecutive days, from 24 December 2011 to 15 January 2013 inclusive.

3 January 2013.

It’s a brand new year, and I’ve made my way to northern Germany where brisk sea breezes from the North Sea sweep into the waters of the Watten Sea. Parts of this territory are protected as nature park, wildlife refuge, and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Some smaller sections can be accessed, especially at low tide as seen in this image. Half-hidden in early-winter mist are two ships travelling southeast (left to right) into the mouth of the Elbe river.

I made the image on 3 Jan 2013 with a Canon EOS450D (Rebel XSi) and these settings: 1/320-sec, f/5.6, ISO400, and 49mm focal length (78mm full-frame equivalent). This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-ngb.

Before Bauhaus: Alfeld Fagus Factory, UNESCO WHS

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.

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Nobel-Rondell, Nobel Rondel, Nobel Prize, Stadtfriedhof, Göttingen, Niedersachsen, Lower Saxony, Germany, fotoeins.com

Göttingen: a circle of Nobel Prize winning scientists

What: Circular feature celebrating Nobel Prize winners, all of whom worked at the city’s university.
Where: Stadtfriedhof (city cemetery) in Göttingen.

Göttingen is a university town in central Germany. Not only will I find a memorial to Nobel Prizes, I’m here also to acknowledge my academic training. I spent many years studying physics and astronomy, and while I’m no longer active in science research, I enjoy the search and discovery of the final resting spots for scientists whose work formed a significant part of my education. Visiting their graves provides direct historical connection to “academic predecessors”; to go beyond the abstraction of simply learning their names and contributions to science, the gravestones belong to real people with keen minds, family lives, and all too human imperfections.

45 Nobel Prize laureates have been or are connected with the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen as of posting (2018). That’s a phenomenal number, as this single institution accounts for 8 per cent of all Nobel Prizes (585 as of 2017).

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