Nellefabrik

Brief information

The Van Nelle Factory looks important not because of palatial luxury, but because of industrial honesty: it is a former factory where coffee, tea, and tobacco were produced, and its facades were made mainly of steel and glass. For an industrial building of the 1920s, this appearance was a statement of new architecture: structure, light, and function became more noticeable than the decorative shell.

The complex was designed by Leendert van der Vlugt under the influence of Soviet constructivism. Therefore, the Van Nelle Factory should be read not as one beautiful building, but as a modernist factory organism. Production stopped in 1996, but it was precisely its former industrial form that helped the building gain UNESCO World Heritage status in 2014.

What to notice right away

It makes sense to compare three things: the steel elements of the facades, the large glass surfaces, and the fact that the complex consists of several industrial buildings. Together, they show how architecture emphasized the work of the factory: it did not hide production behind a heavy wall, but made the building light, transparent, and rational.

Steel and glass are important here not as decoration, but as the language of Nieuwe Bouwen modernism, the Dutch version of the new architecture. The several buildings remind us that this was not a separate pavilion, but a functioning factory complex. The fact about coffee, tea, and tobacco changes the way one sees the austere facades: behind their cool geometry stood the everyday production of goods usually associated not with factory architecture, but with a home table or a shop window.