Qualla: Fagus Factory

Fagus Factory: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Carl Benscheidt chose his building site to be seen. In October 1910 he resigned from the shoe-last firm in Alfeld he had run since 1896, after falling out with the founder's son, and immediately bought the plot directly across the railway line from his old employer's works. The two factories would face each other over the tracks. Benscheidt decided that the elevation on the railway side — the one read at speed, through a train window, by everyone passing up the Leine valley — was going to be a permanent advertisement. Then he went looking for an architect who could make it one.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Fagus Factory: A Facade Aimed at a Railway

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clemensfranz, CC BY-SA 4.0. Benscheidt had come to the trade sideways. He started out working for Arnold Rikkli, a practitioner of naturopathic medicine, and it was there that he first met orthopedic shoe lasts — the wooden forms a shoe is built around. Hired in 1887 as works manager at Carl Behrens's last ...

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Image: Clemensfranz | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fagus Factory: The Corner That Isn't There

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carsten Janssen, CC BY-SA 2.0 de. Gropius and Meyer had spent the previous year in the office of Peter Behrens, working on his AEG turbine factory in Berlin, finished in 1909. Fagus is their reply to it, and the reply is close to an exact inversion. Both buildings free their corners of visible support and run gl...

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Image: Carsten Janssen | CC BY-SA 2.0 de

Fagus Factory: It Is Made of Bricks

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit gb pandey from chandigarh, India, CC BY-SA 2.0. For most of a century, writers described the main building as a steel or concrete frame carrying a curtain wall, on the reasonable grounds that it looks like one. It isn't. During the restoration that began in 1982, the engineer in charge, Jürgen Götz, found plain brickwork risin...

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Image: gb pandey from chandigarh, India | CC BY-SA 2.0

Fagus Factory: Fourteen Years, Interrupted

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Vmenkov, CC BY-SA 3.0. Construction started in May 1911 and Benscheidt wanted product moving by that winter; he very nearly got it. By winter 1912 the orders had outrun the plant, and the expansion of 1913 roughly doubled the built area, extending the complex to the street on the south side and giving ...

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Image: User:Vmenkov | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fagus Factory: Still Cutting Lasts

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Traveler100, CC BY-SA 3.0. UNESCO listed the Fagus Factory in 2011, a century after the first shovel went in, and the listing is unusual because the site never became a monument in the ordinary sense. Benscheidt's buildings are still a working factory, turning out lasts for the shoe industry along with fir...

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Image: Traveler100 | CC BY-SA 3.0