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 modern-looking 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 early 1960s.1 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 single-glazed 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 of the handful of books and articles2 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 Alma Mahler in August the year before.3 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 Edvard Munch to Alma to note the birth.4 He first saw Manon when she was nearly six months old (a good time to receive a toy bear), describing her as, 'simply charming'.5 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 when he forgot her eighteenth, and last, birthday. 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 Berg's violin concerto DemAndenken eines Engels.
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