Van Nelle Factory

The Van Nelle Factory is a former coffee, tea and tobacco processing plant on the Schie river in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, designed by the architect Leendert van der Vlugt of the firm Brinkman en van der Vlugt with the civil engineer J.G. Wiebenga and built between 1925 and 1931. Conceived as one of the earliest and most complete expressions of the Dutch Nieuwe Bouwen, or New Building, functionalist movement, the complex is built around steel-reinforced concrete frames sheathed in glass curtain walls that were, by the factory's own reputation, among the first industrially prefabricated curtain walls anywhere. The building drew praise from prominent modernists soon after completion: Le Corbusier called it in 1932 the most beautiful spectacle of the modern age, and the critic Howard Robertson described it in 1930 as a poem in steel and glass. Production continued until 1996, after which the complex was renovated beginning in 2000 into offices, co-working space and event venues, and UNESCO inscribed the Van Nelle Factory as a World Heritage Site in 2014.