"In 1938 Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer hired Neufert to, as Speer put it, “oversee the standardization of building parts, and the rationalization to building methods.” He got to lead his own team of designers and technicians. They were called The Neufert Department.

He created the Octametric Brick, a standard-sized masonry unit that would come to replace any other sized brick in Germany (the bricks were 12.5 centimeters wide, or one-eighth of a meter, hence its name). Adoption of the brick, as Neufert saw, would create a standardized, modular world that all construction would occur in—no more custom shapes or sizes within buildings, no more worrying that cabinets would be the same height as the stove.

With the Octametric Brick, buildings could still look different and be different sizes, but everything, when reduced to its smallest part, would have this as a base unit. This overarching uniformity, based around the dimensions of a single brick, would be called the Octametric System. Even if products were made of other materials, under this system their dimensions would always have to be evenly divisible by one-eighth of a meter. Everything would finally fit together.

The Nazi government loved it. The Octametric System helped solve several construction issues the regime faced, the most pressing of which was how make the act of building—something that had traditionally been done by skilled craftspeople—simple enough for unskilled laborers to perform. The modular nature of the Octametric System made construction relatively easy and error-proof, more like assembly of building blocks than fine woodworking or masonry.

In this case, unskilled laborers often meant concentration camp prisoners. The Octametric System was believed to help solve problems of worker sabotage, being so simple and transparent that it was difficult to undermine. Individual agency was removed from the job site, much as it was removed from the assembly line of the Model ‘T’.

All of a sudden, in Neufert’s eyes at least, a grid measuring one-eighth of a meter by one-eighth of a meter was overlaid onto all of Germany and its occupied territories. The world was becoming pixelated, a real-life Sim City, a Legoland.

Despite his influence, he’s not exactly a household name. “He wasn’t like Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, where you can point to a signature building,” says Nader Vossoughian, Associate Professor of Architecture at the New York Institute of Technology. “His influence was mostly behind the scenes.”"