Commissioned by owner Carl Benscheidt who wanted a radical structure to express the company's break from the past, the factory was designed by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer.

Because of its influence in the development of modern architecture and outstanding design, the factory has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2011.

In the Fagus factory exactly the opposite happens; the corners are left open and the piers are recessed leaving the glass surface to the front.

[2] Gropius describes this transformation by saying, "The role of the walls becomes restricted to that of mere screens stretched between the upright columns of the framework to keep out rain, cold and noise"[3]At the time of the design of the Fagus factory, Gropius was collecting photographs of industrial buildings in the USA to be used for a Deutscher Werkbund publication.

He had then started by working for Arnold Rikkli, who practised naturopathic medicine, and it was there that he learned about orthopedic shoe lasts.

In 1887 Benscheidt was hired by the shoe last manufacturer Carl Behrens as works manager in his factory in Alfeld.

Gropius accepted the offer and a long collaboration began that continued until 1925 when the last buildings on the site were completed.

Construction started in May 1911 based on Werner's plans and Benscheidt wanted the factory to be running by winter of the same year.

[citation needed] In order to pay the additional costs of Gropius’s design, Benscheidt and his American partners had decided on a smaller building than the one that was actually planned.

[citation needed] After the war the work continued with the addition of minor buildings such as the porter's lodge and the enclosure wall.

Overall, Werner's intended layout for the individual buildings within the complex was carried out; greater uniformity and coherence were achieved, however, through Gropius and Meyer's reductionism in form, material, and color.

[citation needed] For many years, people thought that the main building was made of concrete or steel, because of its glass façade.

Jürgen Götz, the engineer responsible for the renovation since 1982, describes the construction system like this: "The main building was erected on top of a structurally stable basement with flat caps.

These fames were, however, only floor-to-floor height, screwed to the building on four sides; one string course that reached across the three floors consisted, in fact, of three different sections.

Only in the building [the Steiner House, Vienna] by Adolf Loos which was done one year before the Fagus Factory, have we seen the same feeling for the pure cube.

Benscheidt considered that the point of view of the passengers on the trains was the one that determined the image of the building and placed great weight on the facade on that side.

According to the historian of architecture Annemarie Jaeggi these thoughts were important in the design of Fagus: "The animated fluctuation in height, the change between horizontal structure and vertical rhythms, heavy closed volumes and light dissolved fabrics, are indicators of an approach that deliberately utilized contrasts while arriving at a harmony of opposites in a manner best expressed as a pictorial or visual structure created from the perspective of the railroad tracks.