history
arq (2016), 20.4, 345–356. © Cambridge University Press 2017
Why is the 1903 double glass curtain walled Steiff factory not
considered part of modern architectural history, unlike the less
modern 1911 Fagus Factory of Gropius and Meyer?
Gropius and the Teddy Bear:
a tale of two factories
Brenda Vale and Robert Vale
While based in Nuremburg and researching into
toys and their relationship to architecture, we
visited the Steiff Museum in the small German
town of Giengen. Walking from the railway station,
before you even reach the museum you pass the
Steiff factory, at the front of which is a very modernlooking three-storey all-glass building with an
almost flat roof. It has a double glass curtain wall,
with a steel structure from which the glazing is
hung, visible between the double glass panes. The
most surprising aspect of this austerely functional
building is that the glass on the end wall is dated
1903 [1]. We have been teaching architecture for
a very long time, but had never come across this
building before. For its date it seemed highly
advanced, architecturally as well as thermally, with
a double wall not unlike that of Emslie Morgan’s
pioneering solar school in Wallesey, UK from the
1
early 1960s. Why had we never read about or been
told about this early advanced factory building?
Why is the Fagus factory by Walter Gropius and
Adolf Meyer, which only has three-storey singleglazed windows, so often held up as the first
modernist factory? We had to find out more. This
article is based on what we discovered in our reading
2
of the handful of books and articles that mention
the Steiff building and our revisits to both buildings.
In 1903, when the steel and glass Steiff factory was
built for the manufacture of teddy bears, Walter
Gropius was twenty and beginning his study of
architecture in Munich, some 111km away from
Giengen by train, making a change at Ulm, just as is
required today. Thus, although he may have been too
old for teddy bears, this article was inspired by the
fantasy that Gropius could have visited Giengen and
seen the all-glass factory. Later Gropius had reason
to buy a teddy bear as he had a daughter, Manon,
born in 1916 following his unhappy marriage to
3
Alma Mahler in August the year before. Perhaps he
bought his new daughter a fashionable Steiff bear,
but probably not. In September 1916, as a cavalry
officer, and a decorated war hero, Gropius was in
the trenches at Verdun. He did send a picture by
4
Edvard Munch to Alma to note the birth. He first
saw Manon when she was nearly six months old
(a good time to receive a toy bear), describing her
5
as, ‘simply charming’. We know from their later
correspondence that Gropius bought presents for
Manon; Bauhaus furniture for her bedroom, a
Bauhaus glass tea set, and a 400-year-old jade pendant
1 The Steiff factory,
Giengen, Germany.
1
doi: 10.1017/S1359135516000518
history
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
345
346
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
history
when he forgot her eighteenth, and last, birthday.6
In 1935, after Alma and Gropius had divorced and
Gropius had married Ise Frank, Manon died from
polio, a tragedy that became the theme of Alban
7
Berg’s violin concerto Dem Andenken eines Engels.
This article explores both the controversial history
of the teddy bear and the less controversial history of
the modernist factory in Germany, which is normally
traced from Peter Behrens’s factory for AEG (1909)
8
to Gropius and Meyer’s factory for Fagus (1911) and
beyond, omitting the 1903 double-skinned glass and
steel Steiff building, still in use today for its original
purpose of making stuffed toys.
The bear factory
The Steiff toy-making empire was created by a
woman in a wheelchair. Margarete Steiff, another
childhood polio victim like Manon, earned her
living sewing women’s clothes until she made her
first stuffed toy, which was an elephant-shaped
pincushion. Children loved them and sales by her
brother Fritz (Friedrich) at a local market led to the
1880 foundation of the company Margarete Steiff
GmbH. By 1904 the firm was making 973,999 teddy
9
bears a year as well as nearly 2 million other toys.
Moreover, these bears were made in a purposedesigned building. The 1903 Steiff factory [2] is not
just an extraordinary building for its time, but one
that is almost entirely absent from the history of
modern architecture. With its steel frame, doubleskin curtain wall and glazed corners, it has all the
elements of a modernist factory, except perhaps
transparency, although this was a deliberate
design choice.
The strangeness of this 1903 all-glass factory
comes into perspective when reading Budgett
Meakin’s 1905 book on model factories.10 This work
discusses lighting, ventilation, cleanliness, and
gardens as important in the modern workplace and
then suddenly praises the Templeton carpet factory
in Glasgow, which was made, ‘a thing of beauty
and an added attraction to the neighbourhood, by
facing it with coloured brickwork after the design
of the Doge’s Palace in Venice’, although also noting
that this was also an advertisement for the firm
with, ‘no need to label such a building with the
11
name of its owners’.
The Steiffs already had a factory in Giengen,
built by Margarete’s brother Fritz Steiff who took
over his father’s building business, and in 1899 the
factory was expanded with a glazed packing house
linking the two buildings constructed earlier along
12
what is now Margarete Steiff Strasse. This linking
building was designed with large arched floor-toceiling windows between masonry piers (currently
partially filled in, as the factory buildings are
now residential). Although contrasting with the
rectangular windows-in-wall construction of the
1888 and 1890 buildings, it gave no foreshadowing
of the new glass factory to come on the opposite
side of the road. However, the popularity of the
teddy bear demanded further expansion of the
original factory. By this time, three of Margarete
Steiff’s nephews (three of the six sons of Fritz, five of
whom were eventually to join the Steiff company)
had joined the firm, the first being Richard who
arrived in 1897, and who was to design not just the
original Steiff jointed bear but also the new factory.
Richard may have been influenced by visits to
London in 1897 where he saw the Crystal Palace
(1851), and to Munich, which also had a glass
13
palace, the Glaspalast (1854), though neither had
2
Brenda Vale and Robert Vale Gropius and the Teddy Bear
history
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
347
3a
2 1903 block, Steiff
Fabrik, Giengen,
designed by Richard
Steiff.
3 Schwebebahn,
Wuppertal, still
running in 2015,
compared with the
Steiff steel frame.
a double glass skin. Having studied business in the
family firm he went to the Arts and Crafts School
in Stuttgart. There he must also have seen the
1842–6 ‘Summerhouse with Living Quarters and
Ornamental Plant Houses in the Moorish Style’
in Park Wilhelma, which consisted of a central
14
villa flanked by two cast iron glasshouses. The
orangery, another type of highly glazed building,
although originating in Italy was also known in
Germany, with the first example constructed in
1614 in Heidelberg, as a permanent stone structure
with a solid flat roof and many opening full-height
15
windows.
However, rather than the all-glass building it may
have been the speed of construction of the Crystal
Palace and the Glaspalast in Munich, both of which
were prefabricated (and both later destroyed by
fire), that appealed to the business side of Richard
Steiff. At the Crystal Palace the contractor agreed
to enclose the eighteen acres (approx. 73,000m2)
16
covered by the building in twenty-two weeks. The
building was only handed over in 1851 after nine
months (forty weeks), still an amazing achievement,
although exhibits had started to go in after six
17
months. The Glaspalast, which opened on 15 July
1854, also took nine months in total for design
18
and construction. Given it was possible to erect
an all-glass building this quickly, in the face of the
3b
profits that could be made from the unprecedented
demand for teddy bears, a quickly-erected glass
structure would have seemed logical.
The idea may have come from Friedrich Steiff
(Margarete and Fritz’s father) who went to the 1893
19
World’s Fair in Chicago. There the Horticultural
20
Building featured a glass dome 180ft in diameter.
More influential on the rectangular structure
of the new factory could have been the framed
structures in Chicago such as the 1885 Home
21
Insurance Building and the first building with
a skeleton steel structure, the ten-storey Rand
McNally Building of 1889, by Burnham and Root
22
(demolished 1911). The frame of the latter was of
riveted rolled steel beams and columns assembled
23
from steel members used in bridge construction.
Gropius and the Teddy Bear Brenda Vale and Robert Vale
348
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
history
Steel construction was also being used in
Germany at that time, at least for engineering
structures, with, for example, the first section of
the Wuppertal Schwebebahn opened in 1901 after
construction started in 1898. Designed by the
engineer Eugene Langen, this ‘suspension railway’
used built-up steel supports for its linear track
over the River Wupper and large riveted steel
portal frames, very like the frames at either end
of the Steiff building, where the track ran above
24
the centre of the streets [3]. Within this milieu
it is not surprising that a steel structure was used
for the 1903 three-storey all-glass Steiff factory. In
1902 Margarete Steiff wrote to another nephew,
Paul, then in the US, that, ‘Richard envisages a
building made of iron and glass [...] – whether it will
25
work only time will tell’, but her expertise was in
sewing, and not in building.
A glass building would also give plenty of daylight.
Michael Stratton states that early examples of
daylight factories in America, which Paul Steiff
might have seen, were a development of the mills of
the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, and
typically had a concrete frame with more glass (as
steel-framed windows) than solid in the elevation.
26
Reyner Banham suggests the real revolution in
early American factories was from 1902–6, when
the reinforced concrete frame replaced the former
27
brick pier construction. What Paul Steiff may have
taken from his American visit was the importance of
designing for daylight and what Banham describes
as the American ‘flat-topped profile’ of its multi28
storey industrial buildings. These contrasted with
the typical European industrial buildings of several
29
storeys with steeply pitched tiled roofs. The Steiff
factory has a slightly sloping roof but, unlike the
American examples, there is no parapet to hide it.
30
Raymond McGrath and Albert Frost claim the
glass wall originated with the work of Joseph Paxton
and, ‘was soon exploited in the iron and glass
warehouse in Jamaica Street, Glasgow, 1856, and by
the end of the century was already fully realised in
the four-storied [sic] plate-glass facade of the Tietz
Department Store in Berlin (1896).’ Lost in the
Second World War, this building was completed in
1900 and featured flamboyant Baroque stonework
framing the two street-facing glass walls making the
displays inside visible to those outside, the whole
also being roofed with a glass barrel vault. Claimed
as the first curtain facade (Vorhangfassad) in Germany
each iron-framed plate glass wall was 26m wide
31
by 17.5m high. Polished plate glass at this time
was an expensive product. Of even more relevance
to the theme of this article, the family history of
Tietz describes the creation of this building as a
collaboration of German and American engineers
who made the calculations around which the
32
architect Bernhard Sehring planned the building.
The same point is made by the operators of the
contemporary Wuppertal Schwebebahn:
At the end of the 19th century, steel engineering
was still a relatively new field of construction. Only
after the creation of the first major steel structures,
including the Wuppertal Suspension Railway, were the
Brenda Vale and Robert Vale Gropius and the Teddy Bear
calculations actually tested and confirmed.33
This suggests an alternative history of the ‘new’
materials of iron, glass, and concrete, that is,
the history of the engineering calculations that
allowed these old materials to be used in new ways,
within which the Steiff factory could have a place.
The modern movement is perhaps less about new
materials than about new calculations.
The Crystal Palace of 1851 was roofed with sheet
glass blown as cylinders 10 inches diameter and
49 inches long and 1/13th inch thick and then
34
flattened into sheets. This was installed using
putty. According to the planning application of
20 February 1903, the interior glass of the Steiff
factory was to be frosted glass with the outer skin of
35
clear glass. However the Steiff factory as it stands
is glazed with cast glass, since it is rough on both
sides. This rough rolled plate glass was made by
pouring the molten material on to a table, and
the glass was then rolled into a sheet. A textured
surface to the table produced rough rolled plate
glass which in 1875, Percy Major Smith described as
suitable, ‘where coarse, strong, translucent material
is required. The light is admitted without scorching
or glare’. Smith deemed such glass appropriate for
36
the windows of railway stations and factories.
Whether German orangeries and monorails,
the English Crystal Palace or American industrial
buildings provided inspiration, the Steiff factory
goes beyond all these prototypes in being not just
all-glass but also double-glass. This principle of
double-glazing was already familiar in German
residential buildings, with removable glazed
wooden frames being added to the interior of
windows at the onset of winter. This would give
a gap between the panes that could vary from
100mm to 300mm. Writing about the life in 1835
of the prosperous Buddenbrooks family, Thomas
Mann describes the double windows being installed
in the house by mid-October to keep Madame
37
Buddenbrooks Senior warm. The oldest such
double windows in Germany, dating to 1695, are in
the Upper Castle in Pfingen in Ulm, now converted
38
to apartments. Even given this German domestic
tradition of double windows it was not just that the
Steiff factory had double glass walls, but the fact
the glass was hung from the steel frame located
between the two glass skins that made Steiff’s
design so unusual for its date.
The Steiff curtain wall
The double curtain wall designed by Richard Steiff
is all-glass to allow the levels of natural light needed
inside the factory for the fine work of making teddy
bears, much of which is done by hand. The wall is a
true curtain, being non-loadbearing and tied back
to the steel frame, which is located between the
two glass skins, so that as at the later Fagus factory
the corners of the building are glass, although at
Steiff the steel frame is visible in the translucent
corners. Opening windows occur at intervals in
the double glass facade. The external glass has a
39
rippled texture (Kathedralglas) to reduce glare and
prevent anyone seeing inside, thus protecting the
history
Steiff process from being viewed by competitors.
A low-pressure steam heating system was installed
to maintain temperatures in winter. In summer
the intention had been to cool the building using
cross ventilation through the opening windows in
40
the facade, combined with use of internal blinds
but in the event, ventilator fans were also installed,
together with the pragmatic gardener’s trick of
whitewashing the glass walls in summer to avoid
41
excessive solar gain.
At this early stage, trying to achieve an acceptable
indoor environment was still a question of trial
and error. The thermal performance of the 1911
single-glazed Fagus factory was also unsatisfactory,
with office workers near the windows having
to wear extra clothes and thermal underwear
in winter because of the cold draughts. Fagus
also suffered from over-heating in summer even
with the later installation of an air conditioning
42
system. This is not surprising given its east-southeast orientation which would cause it to heat up
quickly on a summer morning. Rust was an issue
for some of the Fagus windows from as early as
43
1919 but this appears not to have been a problem
at Steiff, where 80% of the glass is original, with
44
panes being replaced as necessary over the years.
In fact, the 1903 building served its purpose so well
that further buildings with double glass curtain
walls were constructed on the Steiff site, albeit with
timber rather than steel frames, and by 1910 just
over 1.5 hectares of floor area were enclosed by
45
double glass walls.
The wall of the Steiff factory is completely
different from the ‘mur neutralisant’ of Le Corbusier,
which first appeared in the Villa Schwob (1912) at
46
La Chaux de Fonds. Le Corbusier is often credited
with being an early exponent of the use of double
47
glass walls. At the Villa Schwob the two-storey
floor to ceiling glazing around the front door, like
other large windows in the villa, was double with
heating pipes between the glass skins to prevent
down draughts from the otherwise cold glass. Le
Corbusier went on to use the same technique in
his glass curtain-walled Cité de Refuge (1929–33)
in Paris, which was sealed, with the intention of
passing warm air into the cavity between the glass
skins. In fact architects seem to have had this
passion for warming the outside (in this heated
cavity situation the heat will flow to the colder
exterior rather than to the warmer interior of the
building), as Alvar Aalto also used heating elements
in the double windows of his Paimio Sanatorium
(1929–33), to warm the incoming fresh air which
passed through a series of baffles, although here
48
the windows were not sealed. The fact that the
Steiff factory significantly predates these much
more famous buildings is perhaps a tribute to the
willingness of the architectural profession to ignore
buildings that work, in favour of apparently more
delightful failures, like the Cité de Refuge where the
double glass system was not built, with subsequent
overheating and the need for the addition of
49
opening windows and brise-soleils.
One of the few books to mention the Steiff factory
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
349
claims it as the first double-skin curtain walled
50
building. This now fashionable technique has
been hailed as a good way for modern corporate
51
architecture to appear to be ‘green’. However, it
is not just its ‘green’ credentials that should have
earned Steiff a place in architectural history but
rather the fact that it is a true all-glass box. Instead,
it is the 1911 Fagus factory with its large windows
that is seen as the first modern factory.
The Fagus factory
The Fagus factory (which made shoe lasts from
beech wood, hence the company name which
is the Latin name for the beech tree) has been
described as one of the most important early
52
modernist buildings and in 2011 was listed as a
53
UNESCO World Heritage site. It is also a building
54
that helped to establish Gropius, the architect,
although it is perhaps fairer to say that Gropius
helped himself to fame through the Fagus factory,
becoming an expert in industrial building
55
following the Fagus commission. His lecture of
1911 entitled Monumentale Kunst und Industriebau
(Monumental Art and Industrial Building) a typewritten
version of which is in the Bauhaus archives, deals
not just with German examples of factories and
railway stations, but also with bridges from the UK
56
and grain silos from North and South America.
One of Gropius’s first commissions was the
4
4 The ‘Gropius knot’,
which a medieval
carpenter would
recognise as a
dragon beam, is
visible through the
corner glazing of the
1911 block.
Gropius and the Teddy Bear Brenda Vale and Robert Vale
350
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
history
5
1905–6 Kornspeicher (granary) at his uncle’s farm
although this building has a pitched roof and is
57
more picturesque than monumental. Gropius
also claimed to be the first architect to use a real
58
curtain wall at the Fagus factory. The Fagus factory
however, is better considered as a series of threestorey windows between brick piers. The brick
piers slope inwards slightly from bottom to top
and the windows have alternating glass and solid
metal panels corresponding to the floor slabs. This
arrangement is the opposite of the long street
elevation of the earlier AEG factory by Behrens,
where the windows slope inwards towards the top
and the piers in between are vertical.
Structurally the Fagus building is similar to a
nineteenth-century mill, built of brick with iron
59
beams between the brick piers and the rear wall
even though American factories had already started
using reinforced concrete frames to replace brick
60
piers in 1902. Gropius’s famous glass corner is
supported by a version of a dragon beam, such as
might be found in a mediaeval timber building, but
61
in steel and known as the ‘Gropius knot’ [4]. What
is ‘modern’ about the Fagus factory is much less
the way it is constructed but rather its appearance,
especially the glazed corners [5]. However, the
legend is that the Fagus factory is a ‘skeleton frame
62
structure with glazed curtain walls’, or, ‘the first
factory featuring a curtain wall: from a skeletal
frame the architects hung a glass facade which even
63
extended to transparent corners’ [5].
The glass factory
This article is not the first attempt to give Richard
Steiff’s building its true place in architectural
history. In 1932 a brief article described it as one
of the best examples of functional architecture
Brenda Vale and Robert Vale Gropius and the Teddy Bear
to emerge in the last thirty years, though most
of the text discussed the problems of obtaining
building consent for such an advanced building,
especially as the Building Inspector believed an
64
all-glass building would make people blind.
The Steiff factory was also mentioned briefly
in the 1932 book Der Industriebau by Hermann
65
Maier-Leibnitz. In a discussion of glazed walls
and day lighting, three wall sections are shown,
the normal wall with window, the double glass
Steiff factory and the single-glazed Fagus factory,
but whereas the Fagus factory is illustrated and
66
attributed to Walter Gropius, the Steiff factory
becomes a footnote where it is described as
probably the first glass building for manufacturing
67
purposes. This dismissive footnote also failed
to remark on the fact that this revolutionary
building was constructed from start to finish in
68
just over six months. David Yeoman’s history of
the development of the curtain wall also ignores
Steiff, though the Fagus factory is mentioned, and
he attributes the first 100% glazed wall (single
glass) to the 1917 seven-storey Hallidie Building in
69
San Francisco by Willis Polk. It seems the truly
innovative Steiff factory has remained more or less
unknown in contrast to the aesthetically driven
design of the Fagus factory.
For example, Raymond McGrath and Albert
70
Frost consider Paxton to be the originator of the
transparent wall, and Gropius and Meyer at Fagus
the first to apply it to industry. The architectural
history of the German, modern, glazed factory
usually begins with Behrens’s 1909 AEG Turbinenhalle
in Berlin [6]. Here the single-glazed end wall onto
the main street is almost overwhelmed by the mass
of masonry in the corner piers, which are there for
effect rather than support. The long flanking wall
history
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
351
5 Fagus factory block
by Gropius and
Meyer, 1911.
6 AEG Turbinenhalle by
Peter Behrens, 1909.
7AEG Powerhouse by
Franz Schwechten,
1900.
6
7
has large glass windows that slope between the
supports. Next in time is the 1911 Fagus factory by
Gropius and Meyer, a restyling of an earlier design
by another architect, Eduard Werner, which had
the same three-storey windows, although with
71
arched heads. The 1914 Model Factory for the
Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne by Gropius and
Meyer comes closest to the glass skinned steel frame
ideal achieved by Steiff eleven years earlier, but
again was only single-glazed. Gropius only achieved
his continuous curtain wall in the Bauhaus of 1926,
72
which might be called a factory for learning.
Among these cornerstones of architectural
history, the Turbinenhalle is a monumental shed with
a large glazed opening in the end, looking more
like the west end of a gothic cathedral than a glass
box. Although Nikolaus Pevsner suggests that the
building is the first to synthesise, ‘the imaginative
73
possibilities of industrial architecture’, it echoes
the facade of an earlier building for AEG, the 1900
powerhouse by Franz Schwechten [7], an architect
whose work was looked down upon by the new
74
generation, of which Behrens was part.
Behrens’ factory was famously described by the
art critic Karl Scheffler as a ‘Kathedrale der Arbeit’
75
(‘cathedral of labour’), a description referenced
by Gropius in the typescript of his lecture on
industrial buildings: ‘Scheffler correctly calls the
76
Turbine hall a cathedral of labour.’ Gropius
famously worked for a time in Behrens’s office
and recalled debating with Behrens that both
the front and side facades of the Turbinenhalle
were manipulated for aesthetic rather than true
77
structural reasons. However, when it came to the
Fagus factory main building Gropius was somewhat
less critical of himself, stating in relation to the
windows that the creative spark of the artist goes
.78
beyond logic and reason These same windows he
referred to as a curtain wall, noting that although
this had become central to modern architecture by
the middle of the twentieth century, it would be
hard to imagine the difficulties of getting it past
79
the ‘Baupolizei 1911’. No such difficulties seem to
have stopped Steiff with his double-glazed curtain
wall six years earlier in spite of his troubles with
the Building Inspector.
Gropius and the Teddy Bear Brenda Vale and Robert Vale
352
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
history
A place in architectural history
That the Fagus factory became the modernist icon,
and not the Steiff building, may have more to do
with the evolving history of modern architecture
than the merits of either building, despite the
fact that the latter has been described as, ‘well
80
in advance of Gropius’s famous Fagus-Werke’. A
1924 article in the Architectural Review is somewhat
critical of Fagus because of the brick fascia being
apparently supported on, ‘fragile glass and spidery
81
muntins’. Neither building was one of the three
European factories visited by Frank Yerbury for his
82
1928 book Modern European Buildings. However, a
year later Henry Russell Hitchcock saw Gropius as
seeking, ‘the direct expression of engineering’, in
83
his industrial buildings. In his view, the success
of the Fagus factory was only surpassed by the 1928
van Nelle factory in Rotterdam by Van der Vlugt and
84
Brinkman. By January 1936, Pevsner, in a reported
lecture, describes Gropius as, ‘one of the originators
85
of the modern movement in architecture’, and
this view became entrenched in the book Pioneers of
Modern Design: from William Morris to Walter Gropius,
published later the same year. Pevsner also states:
There was Gropius himself, one of the foremost
architects in the world, who, in 1911, designed a
building which everybody today would from its
86
appearance mis-date as 1930 or 1935.
Poor Meyer is never credited in the lecture and
only appears as architect with Gropius under
the image of the Fagus factory in the book, but,
unlike Gropius, Meyer never became the director
87
of the Bauhaus. The influence of this hotbed of
modernism on cementing its director’s reputation
and his buildings should not be underestimated.
Nor had Meyer been the author, as Gropius had, of
the 1935 book The New Architecture and the Bauhaus,
which begins with a photograph of the transparent
88
corner of the 1911 Fagus factory building. The
following year Walter Curt Behrendt saw the
new utilitarian building types that came with
industrialisation (factories, offices, department
stores) as creating new types of building based on,
89
‘a strict rationality [...] and strong technical logic’.
For him, Gropius was part of this search for new
90
building types.
The current exhibition at the Fagus factory
(October 2016) refers, in a caption to one of the
display panels, to how Gropius and his client Carl
Benscheidt realised the importance of what they
had achieved:
Das von ihnen gemeinsam geschaffene, einmalige Werk
der Industriekultur, dessen bedeutung von Jahr zu Jahr
klarer erkannt wurde (the unique work of industrial
culture they jointly created, whose significance
became recognized more clearly from year to year).
It seems that just as Gropius and Benschiedt
appreciated their achievement, so would the
architectural historians and critics who came
after them. Given all this, it is unsurprising that
the Fagus factory became an icon, to the extent
that Banham can claim that modern architecture
visually begins in 1911 with ‘Gropius’s Fagus factory’
91
and ends with the glass skyscraper.
Brenda Vale and Robert Vale Gropius and the Teddy Bear
The teddy bear
The Steiff factory was built to make teddy bears,
whose history is at least as contested as that of
the modern factory. The ‘teddy’ appendage comes
from President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt after
the president had refused to shoot an old bear that
was a ‘plant’ so that his 1902 bear hunt should be
a success, an event popularised by a cartoon in the
92
press. In fact Roosevelt asked one of his hunting
guides to dispatch the unconscious bear with a
knife so the initial newspaper cartoon was well
93
off the mark. The American version of the teddy
bear story goes that after the cartoon appeared,
Rose Michtom, who with her husband ran a sweet
shop (or candy store) in Brooklyn, overnight
sewed a velvet bear with jointed arms and legs (the
original is now in the Smithsonian collection) and
placed it in the shop window the next day labelled
‘Teddy’s bear’. Someone immediately offered to
buy the bear and the Michtoms eventually gave up
shopkeeping. By 1903, they had founded the Ideal
Toy Company selling teddy bears, having obtained
94
Roosevelt’s permission to use his name. By 1908
so many teddy bears had been sold it was feared
they would replace dolls and destroy the maternal
instincts of the next female generation in the
95
United States. However, if you are German, the
first plush bear (plush is a fabric that has a pile)
with moveable arms and legs was invented in 1902
by Richard Steiff [8].
The purpose behind exploring the history of
the teddy bear in an article about a building is to
show how easily a set of what might be assumed to
be clear historical events can be looked at from a
number of different viewpoints. In her 1966 book A
History of Toys, Antonia Fraser states that the teddy
bear is of American origin but that large numbers
of teddy bears were made in Germany in the same
96
period while Marguerite and Kenneth Fawdry
noted that stuffed toy bears with all four paws on
97
the ground had been around for over a century.
Robert Southey had published The Story of the Three
Bears in 1837 which probably served to popularise
98
bears in general. However, the Fawdrys are noncommittal about where the idea for the teddy bear
came from, acknowledging the Michtoms gaining
Presidential permission to call their toy a ‘Teddy’
bear and the fact that around the same time teddy
bears were produced in quantity at the Steiff
factory. Pauline Cockrill also notes that toy bears
had been around in Germany before the jointed
teddy bear, both as clockwork automaton figures
and as soft toys standing on all fours, some of
99
which, made by Steiff, were mounted on wheels.
She goes on to suggest that jointed plush bears
were made at the same time in both America and
Germany. Gwen White claims general agreement
100
that the first teddy bears were American, which
is in contrast to Deborah Jaffe who states that Steiff
quickly responded to the cartoon of President
Roosevelt allegedly sparing the bear with their
jointed soft bear that could sit and made of mohair
101
plush. Nicholas Whittaker is clear that stuffed
bears predated the President’s refusal to shoot the
history
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
353
8
elderly bear but that this incident gave a massive
102
boost to their popularity in the nursery. Steiff
were certainly making bears in the nineteenth
century, with plush bears offered first, in four
colours and two heights with, according to their
1892 catalogue, ‘soft stuffing for small children’
(weichgestoppt für kleine Kinder) and ‘with voice’ (mit
Stimme) for 1 Mark 20 Pfennigs extra, but these
103
early bears were not jointed.
Whittaker further muddies the waters by
referring to another myth. This was the love of
Edward VII, who reigned from 1901 to 1910 for
koala ‘bears’ (the koala being a marsupial rather
than a formal member of the bear family) in
London Zoo, which gave rise to their popularity
104
and name, as his own nickname was ‘Teddy’. The
Fawdrys also claim the song Teddy Bears’ Picnic as
105
English although the tune comes from The Teddy
Bears Two-step, which was composed in 1907 in
106
America by John Walter Bratton. David Veart sums
it up by simply saying there are two histories for
the bear invented in 1902, one American and one
107
German. There might also be two histories for the
Modernist glass factory, one familiar and German,
and one equally German but overlooked.
Conclusion
It seems the history of architecture can be
constructed from the meanings ascribed to
buildings. Richard Steiff’s factory was designed
to give sufficient daylight for easy construction
of teddy bears. Fast work means more profit and
the glass was there to make the task easy. The
8 Souvenirs – the 2016
Steiff Museum bear
and a Fagus beech
wood last for a
child’s shoe.
functional reason for using obscured glass might
have been to ensure that workers could not see out,
which could be a distraction, or that competitors
could not see in to steal trade secrets. It might
equally have been a response to produce diffused
light and avoid glare, or because obscured glass
108
was a cheaper product. Moreover, whereas the
Fagus factory has undergone a comprehensive
refurbishment including complete replacement of
the windows (the new windows are double-glazed),
the Steiff factory only needed a new roof in 2008,
because the original had blown off in a storm.
Today, the glass is 80% original, and when the top
two floors were converted to offices (the ground
floor is still used for toy-making), the wood flooring
109
was taken up, sanded, and replaced. The advanced
technology of the Steiff factory was employed to
create an effective factory, whereas when Gropius
and Meyer designed the Fagus factory – technically
only a restyled Victorian mill – it was intended
to convey what Modernism was about as much as
to provide office accommodation and associated
work spaces for the shoe last factory Ironically, the
construction of the more functionally-designed
Steiff building has been ignored in the subsequent
construction of the history of functionalism.
The Steiff factory could have been ignored
because it was not designed by an architect,
Gropius and the Teddy Bear Brenda Vale and Robert Vale
354
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
history
but then nor was the Crystal Palace, which was
designed by a gardener. In general the history
of architecture seems to have more respect for
engineers than gardeners, citing the bridges of
110
the Swiss engineer Robert Maillart and the work
111
of Owen Williams. However, these are engineers
who engage in serious civil engineering rather
than stuffed-toy design. The Steiff factory could
have been ignored because Giengen is a very small
town on a railway branch line, but then Alfeld,
where the Fagus factory still stands, is hardly on
many tourist destinations unless they are making
a pilgrimage to Gropius (although the factory
was always intended to be visible to those passing
112
by train). As an archetypal glass box, the Steiff
factory seems to fit and indeed to predate, so many
of the tenets of Modernism—it is functional, made
of steel and glass, and devoid of ornament. Despite
a number of attempts to bring it to public notice
(and this is just one more) it remains obscure. The
book and article of 1932 have been mentioned. In
the 1970s an article was published in Bauen und
Wohnen describing the building and concluding its
anonymity was due not so much to the fact that
it was situated far from the centres of modern
building but that it did not have a famous name
113
attached to it. This is fair comment except that
the factory does have a famous name attached to
it, but a name better known for teddy bears and
other plush toys, as well as the Knopf im Ohr (Button
in Ear) brand, which was a 1904 invention of
114
Richard Steiff’s brother Franz. The famous name
is the user of the building rather than its designer.
Toys produced by Gropius’s Bauhaus are a long
way from the comfort of a well-loved bear, being
mostly wooden, geometric, and painted in primary
115
colours, such as Alma Buscher’s Bauspiel ‘Schiff’
and her Throw Dolls made of wooden beads, bast
fibre bodies and chenille clothing, which were
meant to be cuddled (in a stringy sort of way) as
116
well as thrown, but were more cuddly than the
Notes
1. Peter Manning, ‘St. Georges School
Wallasey: an Evaluation of a
Solar Heated Building’, Architect’s
Journal, 149:6 (1969), 1715–21.
2. A book in German on the Steiff
Factory is due for publication late
in 2016: Bernhard Niethammer
and Anke Fissabre, Die Steiff
Spielwarenfabrik in Giengen/Brenz
(Aachen: Geymüller, Verlag für
Architektur).
3. Francoise Giroud, Alma Mahler or the
Art of Being Loved (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991), p. 113.
4. Ibid., p. 118.
5. Reginald Isaacs, Gropius: An
Illustrated Biography of the Creator
of the Bauhaus (Boston; Toronto;
London: Bullfinch Press, 1991),
p. 53.
Brenda Vale and Robert Vale Gropius and the Teddy Bear
peg stick figures of Margaretha Reichard.117 Perhaps
an association with being cuddly and comforting
just does not go with Modernism.
Maybe this article is no more than an illustration
of how history is constructed and how we are
taught what we should regard as important
buildings, and the important architects who
designed them (and Gropius was an excellent
self-publicist), rather than just using our eyes. The
problem comes in that we tend to go and look at
the buildings we learn or read about. We found the
Steiff factory by accident and feel it deserves much
wider consideration. This is not the only building
that fails to make mainstream architectural history.
Good, and even great, architecture has to be about
what we see for ourselves and not just what we are
told is good. The Steiff factory is a building where
performance was considered alongside aesthetics.
Whilst Annemarie Jaeggi admits the Steiff factory
with its double translucent glass skin was more
functional thermally and in terms of lack of glare
than Fagus she sees it as, ‘the work of an engineer,
not an architect/artist, whereas the Fagus building
118
was […] rooted […] in a profound theory’. Jaeggi
accepts that the Fagus factory did not perform
well, but the profound irony is that this does not
seem to detract from its perceived importance as
she finds that a less functional building designed
according to a theory of functionalism is of
greater significance than a building that is actually
functional. Whatever the reason, Steiff’s remarkable
glass factory architecturally languishes in an
unknown backwater. It is tempting to insert one
extra word into Banham’s statement:
Down to about 1940 when authors tend to emphasise
the pioneering use of ‘new’ materials like cast iron,
glass, steel, and concrete, [almost] any engineer or
architect who availed himself of any of these at an
early enough date, however dim or dubious the actual
work done with it, was apparently assured of an
119
honoured place.
6. James Reidel, ‘Walter Gropius:
Letters to an Angel, 1927–35’,
Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, 691 (2010), 88–107.
7. Giroud, Alma Mahler or the Art of
Being Loved, pp. 140–1.
8. 1911 is the date of the Gropius and
Mayer block of offices facing the
railway. The workroom was built
to the plans of Eduard Werner in
1911/12 and extended in 1914, in:
<http://whc.unesco.org/uploads/
nominations/1368.pdf> [accessed
10 November 2016].
9. Steiff Firmenhistorie: <http://www.
steiff.com/de-de/fascination-steiff/
history/> [accessed 10 November
2015].
10. Budgett Meakin, Model Factories
and Villages (London: T. Fisher and
Unwin, 1905).
11. Ibid., pp. 80–1.
12. Günther Pfeiffer, 125 Years: Steiff
Company History (Königswinter:
Heel, 2005), pp. 66–7.
13. Ibid., pp. 155–6.
14. Stefan Koppelkamm, Glasshouses
and Wintergardens of the Nineteenth
Century (London: Granada
Publishing Ltd, 1981), pp. 64–7.
15. John Hix, The Glass House (London:
Phaidon, 1974), p. 10.
16. Christopher Hobhouse, 1851 and
the Crystal Palace (London: John
Murray, 1950), p. 43.
17. Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, The Great
Exhibition of 1851 (London: HMSO,
1950), pp. 13–15.
18. Klaus Bäumler, ‘Glaspalast,
München’, in Historisches Lexikon
Bayerns (2012) <http://www.
historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/
history
artikel/artikel_44720> [accessed 10
November 2015].
19. H. P. C. Weidner, ‘Der Glaspalast
1903’, Bauen und Wohnen, 7 (1970),
229–32.
20. Julie K. Rose, Tour the Fair
(1996) <http://xroads.virginia.
edu/~ma96/wce/tour2.html>
[accessed 12 March 2016].
21. Leslie Thomas, Chicago Skyscrapers,
1871–1934 (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2013), pp. 44–7.
22. Joseph J. Korom, The American
Skyscraper, 1850–1940: a Celebration
of Height (Boston: Branden Books,
2008), pp. 120–1.
23. William A. Starret, Skyscrapers and
the Men who Build Them (New York;
London: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1928), p. 34.
24. Monorails of Europe: Wuppertal,
Germany: <http://www.monorails.
org/tMspages/Wuprtal.html>
[accessed 9 December 2015].
25. Pfeiffer, 125 Years, p. 156.
26. Michael Stratton, Industrial
Buildings: Conservation and
Regeneration (London: E. and F. N.
Spon, 2000), p. 35.
27. Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1986), p. 56.
28. Ibid., p. 39.
29. James M. Richards, The
Functional Tradition (London: The
Architectural Press, 1958).
30. Raymond McGrath and Albert
C. Frost, Glass Architecture and
Decoration (London: Architectural
Press, 1937), pp. 158–9.
31. Alarich Rooch, ‘Wetheim, Tietz
und das KaDeWe in Berlin’, in
The Berlin Department Store, ed. by
Godela Weiss-Sussex and Ulrike
Zitzlsperger (Pieterlen and Bern:
Peter Lang, 2013), p. 191.
32. Georg Tietz, Hermann Tietz:
Geschichte einer Familie und ihrer
Warenhäuser (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Verlags-Anstalt, 1965), pp. 60–1.
33. Technology: <https://www.
schwebebahn.de/2/historytechnology/suspension/> [accessed
23 October 2016].
34. McGrath and Frost, Glass
Architecture and Decoration, p. 123.
35. Weidner, ‘Der Glaspalast 1903’,
fn. 6.
36. Percy Major Smith, Rivington’s
Building Construction (London:
Longmans, 1904 [orig. pub. 1875]),
p. 426.
37. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks:
Verfall einer Familie (1909)
<http://www.gutenberg.org/
files/34811/34811-h/34811-h.htm>
[accessed 12 June 2015].
38. Mila Schrader, Fenster, Glas und
Beschläge als historisches Baumaterial
– Ein Materialleitfaden und Ratgeber
(Suderberg: anderweit Verlag,
2001), p. 68.
39. Weidner, ‘Der Glaspalast 1903’.
40. Scott Murray, Translucent Building
Skins (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013),
p. 53.
41. Pfeiffer, 125 Years, p. 159.
42. Jürgen Götz, ‘Maintaining
Fagus’, in Fagus: Industrial Culture
from Werkbund to Bauhaus, ed. by
Annemarie Jaeggi (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press,
2000), p. 139.
43. Ibid., pp. 136–8.
44. Simone Pürckhauer, personal
communication, 17 October 2016.
45. Pfeiffer, 125 Years, p. 158.
46. Reyner Banham, The Architecture
of the Well-Tempered Environment
(London: Architectural Press,
1969), pp. 158–9.
47. William W. Braham, ‘Active
Glass Walls: A Typological and
Historical Account’, paper
presented at the AIA Convention
(2005) <http://repository.
upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.
cgi?article=1020&context=arch_
papers> [accessed 3 March 2016].
48. Colin Porteous, The New EcoArchitecture (London: Spon, 2002),
p. 61.
49. Banham, Well-Tempered
Environment, pp. 156–7; Porteous,
The New Eco-Architecture, p. 62.
50. Murray, Translucent Building Skins,
pp. 50–6.
51. Harris Poirazis, Double Skin
Facades: a Literature Review (Lund:
Department of Architecture and
Built Environment, Division of
Energy and Building Design,
Lund University, Lund Institute of
Technology, 2006).
52. Gilbert Lupfer and Paul Sigel,
Gropius (Köln: Taschen, 2004), p.
17.
53. Fagus factory in Alfeld: <http://whc.
unesco.org/en/list/1368> [accessed
12 March 2015].
54. Lupfer and Sigel, Gropius, p. 23.
55. Annemarie Jaeggi, Fagus:
Industrial Culture from Werkbund
to Bauhaus (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2000), pp.
44–5.
56. Harmut Probst and Christian
Schädlich, Walter Gropius Band 3:
Ausgewählte Schriften (Berlin: VEB
Verlag for Bauwesen, 1988), p. 28.
57. Reginald Isaacs, Gropius: an
Illustrated Biography of the Creator
of the Bauhaus (Boston; Toronto;
London: Bullfinch Press/Little,
Brown and Co. Inc., 1991), p. 14.
58. Anke Fissabre and Bernhard
Niethammer, ‘The Invention of
the Glazed Curtain Wall in 1903—
the Steiff Toy factory’, Proceedings
of the Third International Congress on
Construction History, Cottbus (2009);
Jaeggi, Fagus, p. 29.
59. Jaeggi, Fagus, p. 29.
60. Banham, A Concrete Atlantis, p. 56.
61. Jaeggi, Fagus, pp. 28–9.
62. Werner Durth and Roland May,
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
355
‘Schinkel’s Order: Rationalist
Tendencies in German
Architecture’, Architectural Design,
77 (2007), 44–9.
63. Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus,
1919–1933 (Köln: Taschen, 2007),
p. 14.
64. Max Cetto, ‘Eine Fabrik von 1903’,
in die neue stadt, Juli (1932), p. 88.
65. Hermann Maier-Leibnitz, Der
Industriebau (Berlin: SpringerVerlag GmbH, 1932), pp. 256–7.
66. ‘Entwurf: W. Gropius’.
67. ‘Spielwarenfabrik M. Steiff, Giengen
a. Br., erbaut 1904 [sic] und
damit wohl das erste Glashaus für
Fabrikationszwecke’.
68. Pfeiffer, 125 Years, p. 82.
69. David Yeomans, ‘The Pre-History
of the Curtain Wall’, Construction
History, 14 (1998), 59–82.
70. McGrath and Frost, Glass
Architecture and Decoration,
pp. 158–9.
71. Jaeggi, Fagus, pp. 16–21.
72. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of
Modern Design (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books Ltd, 1968 [orig.
pub. 1936]), pp. 211–17.
73. Ibid., p. 204.
74. Alan Windsor, Peter Behrens:
Architect and Designer 1868–1940
(London: Architectural Press,
1981), p. 83.
75. Karl Scheffler, Die Architektur der
Großstadt (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer
Verlag, 1913), p. 47.
76. ‘Diese Halle konnte Scheffler mit
gutem Recht eine Kathedrale der
Arbeit nennen’, in Walter Gropius
Band 3, ed. by Probst and
Schadlich, p. 48.
77. Helmut Weber, Walter Gropius und
das Faguswerk (München: Verlag D.
W. Callwey, 1961), p. 23.
78. ‘Der schöpferische Funke des Künstlers
geht über Logik und Vernunft hinaus’,
Ibid., p. 66.
79. Ibid., p. 60.
80. Dennis J. de Witt and Elizabeth
R. de Witt, Modern Architecture in
Europe (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1987), p. 98.
81. Hermann G. Scheffauer, ‘The
Work of Walter Gropius’,
Architectural Review, 56 (1924), 50–4.
82. Frank Yerbury, Modern European
Buildings (London: Gollancz, 1928).
83. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Modern
Architecture (New York: Payson and
Clark, 1929), p. 187.
84. Ibid., pp. 136–57.
85. Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘Post-War
Tendencies in German Art
Schools’, Journal of the Royal Society
of Arts, 84:4339 (1936), 247–62.
86. Ibid.
87. Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design,
p. 213.
88. Walter Gropius, The New
Architecture and the Bauhaus
(London: Faber and Faber, 1965
[orig pub. 1935]), p. 18.
Gropius and the Teddy Bear Brenda Vale and Robert Vale
356
arq . vol 20 . no 4 . 2016
history
89. Walter C. Behrendt, Modern
Building: its Nature, Problems and
Forms (New York: Harcourt Brace
and Company, 1937), p. 97.
90. Ibid., p. 156.
91. Reyner Banham, Age of the Masters
(London: Architectural Press,
1975), p. 16.
92. Real Teddy Bear Story: <http://www.
theodoreroosevelt.org/site/c.
elKSIdOWIiJ8H/b.8684621/k.6632/
Real_Teddy_Bear_Story.htm>
[accessed 11 March 2015].
93. Teddy Bear: <http://
americanhistory.si.edu/press/factsheets/teddy-bear> [accessed 14
October 2016].
94. Rose and Morris Michtom: <http://
www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/
jsource/biography/Michtoms.
html> [accessed 12 March 2015].
95. Teddy Bear: <http://
americanhistory.si.edu/collections/
search/object/nmah_491375>
[accessed 12 March 2015].
96. Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys
(London: Spring Books, 1966),
p. 183.
97. Kenneth Fawdry and Marguerite
Fawdry, Pollock’s History of English
Dolls and Toys (London: Ernest Benn
Ltd, 1979), p. 86.
98. Robert Southey, The Story of the
Three Bears, 2nd edn (1839) <https://
en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Story_
of_the_Three_Bears> [accessed 10
March 2016].
99. Pauline Cockrill, The Ultimate
Teddy Bear Book (London: Dorling
Kindersley Ltd, 1991), p. 12.
100. Gwen White, Antique Toys and
their Background (London: Batsford,
1971), p. 160.
101. Deborah Jaffe, The History of
Toys: From Spinning Tops to Robots
(Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd,
2006), pp. 150–1.
Brenda Vale and Robert Vale Gropius and the Teddy Bear
102. Nicholas Whittaker, Toys Were
Us: a History of Twentieth-Century
Toys and Toy-Making (London:
Orion, 2001), pp. 16–18.
103. Filz-Spielwaren-Fabrik, Katalog
Stuttgart: Stähle & Friedel (1892)
<http://www.teddybaer-antik.de/
baerenbis01.html> [accessed 11
February 2016].
104. Edward VII: <http://www.royal.
gov.uk/historyofthemonarchy/
kingsandqueensoftheunited
kingdom/saxe-coburg-gotha/
edwardvii.aspx> [accessed
20 February 2016].
105. Fawdry and Fawdry, Pollock’s
History of English Dolls and Toys.
106. Pat Padua, The Library of Congress
presents the Songs of America: ‘The
Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ (2014) <http://
blogs.loc.gov/music/2014/02/
the-library-of-congress-presentsthe-songs-of-america-the-teddybears-picnic/> [accessed 12 March
2015].
107. David Veart, Hello Girls and Boys:
a New Zealand Toy Story (Auckland:
Auckland University Press, 2014),
p. 161.
108. Murray, Translucent Building
Skins, p. 55.
109. Pürckhauer, personal
communication.
110. Sigfried Geidion, Space, Time
and Architecture (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1967),
pp. 450–76.
111. David Yeomans and David
Cottam, The Engineer’s Contribution
to Contemporary Architecture
(London: Thomas Telford
Publishing, 2001).
112. Jaeggi, Fagus, p. 39.
113. Weidner, ‘Der Glaspalast 1903’.
114. Jürgen Ceislik and Marianne
Cieslik, Knopf im Ohr (Jülich:
Cieslik Verlag, 1989).
115. Royal Academy, 50 Years Bauhaus
(London: Royal Academy of Arts,
1968).
116. Throw Dolls: <http://bauhausonline.de/en/atlas/werke/throwdolls> [accessed 20 June 2015].
117. Little Peg Dolls: <http://bauhausonline.de/en/atlas/werke/littlepeg-dolls> [accessed 20 June
2015].
118. Jaeggi, Fagus, p. 58.
119. Banham, A Concrete Atlantis,
pp. 32–3.
Illustration credits
arq gratefully acknowledges:
Robert Vale, all images
Acknowledgements
We would like to offer special
thanks to Simone Pürckhauer and
her colleague Carmen Grall for
kindly showing us round the 1903
Steiff building.
Authors’ biographies
Robert and Brenda Vale are
architects and academics.
They wrote their first book on
sustainable design, The Autonomous
House, in 1975 followed by
Green Architecture in 1991. Their
more recent books consider the
environmental impact of lifestyles
while their latest, Architecture on the
Carpet (2013) explores the links over
the last hundred years between
architecture and construction toys
such as Meccano, Bayko, and Lego.
Authors’ addresses
Brenda Vale
brenda.vale@vuw.ac.nz
Robert Vale
robert.vale@vuw.ac.nz
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.