Two striking factory buildings, one in England and the other in the Netherlands, have long served as exemplars of the abstract purity that design solutions based on technology and function brought to industrial architecture in the early 20th century.
When the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam by architects Brinkman and Van der Vlugt and the Boots factory in Beeston, England, by the engineer Sir E. Owen Williams were completed, record published each in its pages, in 1931 and ’33, plus a feature on the Van Nelle Factory under construction in 1929. In honor of its 125th anniversary, the magazine has turned to the eminent architecture historian Kenneth Frampton to discuss the two influential structures he has long admired and written about. In comparing the still extant landmarks, Frampton takes an approach similar to one he exploited in A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Forms, published by Lars Müller in 2015. In that book, Frampton closely scrutinizes the similarities and differences in pairs of selected examples according to: building type and context; the disposition of public and private areas in plan and section; the treatment of circulation and spatial procession; and the structure of the buildings and their enclosing walls. Genealogy provides a salient starting point for examining these two early modernist structures.
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