consumer center

BAUHAUS architecture: The "Consumer Association for Plagwitz and the surrounding area" was founded in 1884 to supply the lower classes of society with inexpensive consumer goods. The association soon became one of the largest in Germany. The administration and production buildings, which housed a bakery, dairy, mill, butcher's shop and coffee roastery, among other things, quickly became too small.

The new building was built in 1930 according to the plans of Fritz Höger, a leading representative of North German clinker expressionism. One of his preferred stylistic elements was the use of clinker for facade design, which he also used in Leipzig. He used Meissen facing clinker for this.

The 180-meter-long reinforced concrete skeleton structure, clad in clinker bricks and filled with masonry, along Industriestrasse is entirely focused on the horizontal effect. This is strikingly designed by bands of windows across the entire façade and the main entrance, which is shaped like a funnel. The building with its horizontal structures and the bowl-shaped window panes creates the impression of a ship sailing past. In this context, the well-thought-out staircase with its turquoise-blue wall tiles and vermilion railing also takes up motifs of shipping. Other stylistic elements are the gilded clinker bricks and the key discs. The consumer center in Plagwitz can be described as Fritz Höger's work that most clearly corresponds to the ideas of modernism in architecture.