The silent Visionary

Gropius is equal to Bauhaus, everyone knows
that. But Fieger is equal to Bauhaus: not so many know that anymore. And yet he was
the silent visionary behind the man who created the Bauhaus and made that
avant-garde school great. Walter Gropius had big ideas for innovative,
groundbreaking architecture for the future, but he was not able to draw them.
For that he depended on his staff, primarily: Carl Fieger.

Four preliminary designs exist by him for what is probably the most famous building in Bauhaus architecture, the Bauhaus School in Dessau.

Carl Fieger was born in 1893 and studied structural engineering and interior design at the School of Arts and Crafts in Mainz. When he was 18, he went to Neubabelsberg near Potsdam and in 1911 began work as a draughtsman in the renowned architectural firm of Peter Behrens, one of the most influential German architects of the early 20th Century.

Many architects who later achieved fame trained in Behrens’ studio, and this is where the young Fieger met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.

Behrens, who made his name as an art nouveau artist, was one of the founders of the German Werkbund, which played a crucial role in preparing the way into the modern age.

"Form follows function" – this famous statement by Luis Sullivan, the first great American skyscraper architect, became the design principle of the Werkbund. Decoration and ornamentation were at the time still part of the functional approach.

And that is why there are some wonderful embellishments in Carl Fieger’s initial furniture designs for this monumental prestige building ...

The shell construction was overseen by Mies van der Rohe, who, as a young site manager at the time, still went by the name of Ludwig Mies. Carl Fieger worked on the interior design and in his coloured drawings displayed his remarkable talent ...

... for showing rooms in perspective and bringing out the different fabric textures, as we can see in this residential hall with a double staircase, three arcade windows of room height ...

... console tables with lidded vases ...

... and a panelled ceiling with plain light bulbs.

It was also the Bauhaus and its protagonists who provided what were now the crucial aesthetic impulses for Fieger’s work.

As the Gropius-Meyer private architectural firm was based in the premises of the Weimar Bauhaus, Fieger got to know the work of Marcel Breuer, who was at the time still a carpentry apprentice, and adapted his geometric forms for his design for a house interior.

From 1922 Fieger turned increasingly to architecture. His own design for an administrative building for the Chicago Tribune newspaper was his commitment to a new plain and functional style of architecture.

Influenced by Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, this design reflected the current trends at the Bauhaus, which interpreted "form follows function" as "doing away with all ornament".

Steel, glass and concrete were the new building materials of the age. The skeleton construction of the building and the glass cube fronting it prefigured the striking Curtain Wall of the later Bauhaus building. In the end, Fieger did not submit this design for the competition, presumably because the firm of Gropius and Meyer was taking part in it with a similar project.

The architecture Fieger designed as an independent architect is innovative. His ‘double house for doctors’ was never built, but was nonetheless included in the prestigious standard textbooks of modern architecture and Gropius also published the design in his Bauhaus series.

Two intersecting cubes of different sizes and their apertures are intended to make different room functions apparent from the outside. Projecting sun roofs are characteristic construction details. An unusual feature are the strip windows, which are set deep in the walls and run round corners where they are broken only by a narrow window bar.

This design for a round house built from standardised components was also spectacular and unusual. There was a huge housing shortage in 1924 and Fieger called for a new type of house that could be industrially manufactured and built in series.

"We need today to invent the house incorporating all modern technical achievements, and that must be cheap enough to be affordable for the majority of those who need housing.”

At 70 square metres it offered room for an entire flat.

For political reasons, Gropius took the Bauhaus from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, and so the private firm moved there as well. Carl Fieger went with him and that is where met his future wife, Dora Sommer. Fieger was now crucially involved in the creative development of project designs and as such was involved in drawing up the fundamental organising idea of the new Bauhaus building complex. The function of each part of the building was intended to be visible from the outside and realised by means of differing heights and facade details.

The most spectacular part of the building is the glazed workshop section. The facade, known as the Curtain Wall, hangs like a skin of glass with a grid of steel glazing bars, seemingly weightless on the load-bearing reinforced concrete skeleton construction.