This shoe lasts factory was the first industrial commission for Walter Gropius and its design was made in collaboration with whom at that time was his partner Adolf Meyer.
At first he thought his promoter Carl Benscheidt work with another architect, Eduard Werner, but Gropius convinced him to pursue a more artistic project. To persuade his client was invited to a conference on monumental art and industrial construction and in his speech posited that "modern life needed new building organisms that match the lifestyles of our time." "The stations, warehouses and factories require self-expression and can not be governed by any mode of living of a bygone era without falling into the vacuum and schematic historical masquerade. The exact form, lacking any chance, the contrasts of form and color are the basis of the rhythm of architectural creation. "
Once he was awarded the Walter Gropius Fagus Factory made in different phases between 1911 and 1925, although the most common picture for the office sector which was built before the First World War, between 1911 1914.
As they were constructing each of the buildings of the complex, Gropius and Meyer took into account not only the function of each one of them but the overall visual unity. With the steady growth of the plant, which had become one of the largest in Germany, it would be completed only in 1925. Benscheidt, father and son, chose the artists of the Bauhaus school of Gropius, for interior design.