C + P and steel go together like fried fish and tartar sauce, like soccer and goal or summer and ice cream. Pretty much inseparable. And so, to mark our 100th company anniversary this year, we are taking a special look at our favorite material. In a four-part series, we will be looking at how our company founders came up with steel, what steel construction is all about and what the future of steel looks like.
In today's first part, we start by looking at how CHRISTMANN + PFEIFER and steel came together in the first place. To do this, we go back to the start, to the first years after the company was founded.
It is not surprising that large tonnages of steel would one day be processed in the idyllic rural area of Breidenbach-Wiesenbach. After all, the local deposits of iron ore had already been exploited in this region of Hesse in the Middle Ages; there were pits and mines. And where water power could be exploited, such as near the River Lahn, ironworks were built for processing. This was followed by iron and steel works and foundries - and with them companies that processed metals.
The Hessian "Hinterland" - a region strong in steel
The Hessian so-called "Hinterland" was already a hard as steel region when Wilhelm Christmann and Otto Pfeifer founded their own forge for components in Wallau an der Lahn in 1925 and built the first C + P factory hall a few kilometers further on in Wiesenbach - made of a steel structure, of course. The two young entrepreneurs only realized that industrial steel hall construction could be a business area with prospects when others wanted just such a functional hall and placed orders with them. More and more new halls were requested. In this way, structural steelwork became the mainstay of the company and has remained so for 100 years. Until today.
Building in steel - and beyon
Whether for plants, halls, bridges or parking garages: steel is strong, resilient, malleable, reusable - simply incredibly versatile. And, of course, magnetically attractive: our staff in planning, production and execution seem almost without exception to be a little bit in love with their favorite material.
Of course, other materials have also been used in the company's history - we cannot and must not only build with steel. That's why turnkey construction, modular construction and our Preflex® Parking Garage complete our portfolio of pure steel construction services today.
But steel remains what it has always been for us: part of our DNA.
