IBA Thüringen

“The Eiermannbau is an iconic work of modernist industrial architecture that the IBA is successively developing as an own initiative. The intention is to demonstrate first-hand how vacant buildings can be revitalised and made habitable in imaginative, sustainable and reactivating ways. An innovative contractual agreement between the LEG Thüringen as the owners and the IBA Thüringen as the tenant allows the IBA to develop concepts for future new users at low risk until 2023. This approach, along with the fact that the building remains in public ownership, are important prerequisites for successfully developing structurally underdeveloped regions.”
Andrea Hofmann, IBA Thüringen Advisory Board

The small town of Apolda lies between Jena and Weimar and was an important industrial location for many decades. Textiles have been produced here since the beginning of the 18th century, initially stockings and later knitwear and hosiery. Very few of the 6,000 jobs that once existed in the textile industry survived after the reunification of Germany. As a result, many of the town’s larger production sites were abandoned, among them a factory building known as the Eiermannbau. Since 2018, the IBA Thüringen has been developing this industrial monument into an open factory.

The Eiermannbau is the only building designed by architect Egon Eiermann in Thuringia. Originally built as a weaving mill to a design by the Apolda architect Hermann Schneider, it was used as a factory for fire extinguishers from the 1930s until 1994. Eiermann extended the original building in 1938 and 1939, respectfully extending the existing building structure while also incorporating the functional and aesthetic requirements of his time. Egon Eiermann is regarded as one of the most important German architects of post-war modernism and was also a furniture designer and lecturer at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. Logic, purity and clarity were his architectural maxims.

Repurposing and development as an Open Factory