Fagus Factory

Carl Benscheidt had managed a shoe-last works owned by others before breaking away in 1911 to found his own; the twenty-eight-year-old Gropius, not yet running his own atelier, and his collaborator Adolf Meyer were hired to design its main office and production buildings, taking over from an established local architect on the client's own initiative. Their model was Peter Behrens' AEG turbine hall in Berlin, where Gropius had briefly worked, but they inverted its logic: instead of massive brick piers with glass filling the gaps, the steel structure here retreats behind the surface, and glass runs floor to ceiling around the corners with nothing appearing to hold it up. It was a radical claim for a factory building to make in 1911 and it announced ideas Gropius would return to at the Bauhaus fourteen years later. Interior fitting-out continued until 1925. The company still makes wooden and plastic shoe lasts on the site, and UNESCO inscribed the factory as a World Heritage Site in 2011.