Carl Fieger

Even with his first building, Carl Fieger (1893–1960) made architectural history. Though the single-family house of 1924 remained an experimental building, the circular building called a Wohnmaschine (machine for living in) had an immense effect on the professional community and future architects. It was an important contribution to the search for new standards in housing construction. Carl Fieger is known first and foremost as a draftsman, initially for Peter Behrens’s office and later for the office partnership of Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer. There he was substantially involved in planning many iconic modern buildings as an architect, among them the Fagus Factory in Alfeld (1922–25) as well the Bauhaus Building and the Masters’ Houses in Dessau (Walter Gropius, 1925/26). Between 1925 and 1928 he held the position of a teacher at the Bauhaus Dessau. But Carl Fieger was more than a mere staff member in Gropius’s office. He left his own mark on modern architecture. For instance, he built the popular restaurant on the banks of the Elbe river, the Kornhaus (1929–30), and his own house in Dessau (1926/27), for which he also designed the interior. Apart from his talents as a draftsman, Fieger had an eye for standardisation and working with prefabricated parts, and an interest in new industrially produced materials that lasted throughout his 40 years of practice. He later put to use the experiences he made in these fields at the Bauhaus as a research fellow at the Deutsche Bauakademie, the German university of architecture in East Berlin. Consequently, in 1953 Carl Fieger became the first architect to plan a prefabricated house in Berlin, a concrete slab building that did not look like one from the outside and hid its construction method behind a traditional facade.

The exhibition Carl Fieger. From the Bauhaus to the Bauakademie highlights the complete oeuvre of the architect, designer and distinguished draftsman. The versatile artistic approaches that Fieger followed also retain the multifaceted character of the Bauhaus in its role as a school of design. The original drawings, architectural models, furniture, photographs and works produced as a student not only show Carl Fieger’s contribution to the architectural education at the Bauhaus, but also shed a new light on the architect – as a designer, who combined new standards with individual expression.