Van Nelle Factory

On the bank of the Schie on the north-western edge of Rotterdam stands the building that Le Corbusier called the most beautiful spectacle of the modern age. The Van Nelle factory was built between 1925 and 1931 for a company that roasted coffee and processed tea and tobacco, commissioned by its co-owner Cees van der Leeuw. It was designed by Leendert van der Vlugt of the office Brinkman & Van der Vlugt, working with the engineer J.G. Wiebenga, a specialist in reinforced concrete, and it is one of the defining works of the Dutch Nieuwe Bouwen movement. The draughtsman Mart Stam also worked on it and later claimed part of the authorship, a dispute that ended with his leaving the office.

The idea was a factory built around light and movement. The long tobacco, coffee and tea blocks have a reinforced-concrete frame and outer walls that are almost entirely glass and steel, often described as the world's first industrially prefabricated curtain wall; workers stood in daylight on every floor. Glazed diagonal bridges, which carried goods by conveyor from the production blocks to the dispatch building by the water, cut across the space between the buildings and have become the factory's signature. The company's name in neon letters on the roof completes a composition that looks as fresh today as it did in 1931.

Production continued until 1996, after the brand had passed to Douwe Egberts. The building was then saved by a careful conversion led by Wessel de Jonge, a specialist in restoring modern architecture, beginning in 2000; today it houses offices, design firms and event spaces. It is a Dutch national monument and, since 2014, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Because it is a working office complex, the interior is not open to the public; the only way in is a guided tour, run by the Chabot Museum, usually at weekends. Tours cross the diagonal bridges and end in the light-filled spaces of the former tobacco factory. The exterior can be seen from the entrance gate and from the surrounding streets, and the factory's directors' houses by the same architect, including the Sonneveld House, now a museum in central Rotterdam, make a natural companion visit.

Getting there

The factory stands in Rotterdam, near the boundary with Schiedam, about 3 km from Schiedam's centre. From Rotterdam Centraal station, bus 38 reaches the "Van Nellefabriek" stop in about ten minutes. Rotterdam The Hague Airport (RTM) is about 4 km away; tours meet at the porter's lodge by the main gate.