Fagus: Industrial Culture from Werkbund to Bauhaus

By Annemarie Jaeggi. Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. 152 pp., illus. Cloth, $34.95. ISBN 1-56898-175-9.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net.

For years, I have wrongly assumed that the Fagus factory in Alfeld, Germany, designed in 1911 by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, was owned by a person named Fagus. Not so, as I learned from this interesting book about the company, its buildings, and its role in industrial culture. The products manufactured at the factory were wooden shoe-lasts (the molds around which shoes were formed), and Fagus is simply the Latin word for beechwood. The German industrialist who founded the factory and commissioned its famous main building was Carl Benscheidt Sr. Born in 1858, Benscheidt wanted to be a doctor, by instead he ended up employed at a naturopathic center where he worked with patients with foot complaints. In those days, for convenience in manufacturing, shoes were produced as identical pairs, with the same straight model being used to make shoes for either foot, so that each newly purchased pair had to be broken in, often painfully, until they fit the wearer's feet. It was Benscheidt's innovation to manufacture shoe-lasts that were specifically designed for right and left shoes. For 23 years, he worked as a factory manager for a major shoe-last firm in Alfeld, then resigned in the wake of an argument with the company founder's son. Less than six months later, in March 1911, with financing provided by an American corporation, he launched his own company, also in Alfeld, which triggered a wave of defections to his factory by craftsmen from his former firm. He chose a familiar, reliable plan for the factory's interior, but hired Gropius and Meyer (who had met while both were apprentices in the studio of Peter Behrens) to design an avant-garde architectural exterior, one that Benscheidt hoped would be an icon of Modernism (as had happened with Behrens' famous design for the AEG turbine factory). As he anticipated, the Fagus factory is emblematic of "less is more," the slogan most commonly said to belong to Modern-era architecture and design. The most celebrated example of this is the way in which the corners meet: When the glass walls come together at the building's corners, they appear to be lacking a load-bearing beam (the supports are there but are simply offset from the corners). More than a decade later, under Gropius' leadership, designers at the Bauhaus produced comparable "magical" forms by omitting the back legs of chairs. In 1919 (which is also the year that the Bauhaus began), management of the Fagus factory was taken over by Benscheidt's son, who proved to be just as resourceful as his father, and was even more actively interested in innovative art, design and architecture. Benscheidt Jr. was a frequent visitor to the Bauhaus, a promoter of arts education, and a conspicuous defender of artistic experimentation, to the point that, after the mid-1920s, the gate of the Fagus factory was "like a revolving door for artists from the international avant-garde." There are only 152 pages in this book, but, to its credit, it feels considerably larger than that. It provides a surprising abundance of facts, and is filled with provocative images of the factory's buildings, its cast of characters, and the products it produced.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review.)