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When a factory gets groovy

In our ceaseless quest to track down fine examples of modern capitalism, I lift my hat and salute blogger Andrew David Chamberlain , who has recently returned to blogging after a haitus, for pointing out a stupendous example of modern factory design in Dresden, Germany. The new Volkswagen plant is amazing, and if you follow the Car & Driver site he links to, you can see just how far things have come.

At one stage, car factories, like factories generally, were grim, smoky and frankly ugly buildings. We all know the images from old school textbooks about the Industrial Revolution, with rows of workers grinding away in massive structures belching out smoke. (Of course the same textbooks were often written by historians hostile to free enterprise, such as R.H. Tawney and Stalinist apologist Eric Hobsbawm but that is another topic on its own).

Well, for a variety of reasons, not least the massive rise in working condition standards, the quality of surroundings in a modern manufacturing plant has moved a light-year away from the Dark Satanic Mill cliched image of old.

I find it rather amusing that Germany, not a country which gets the credit it perhaps deserves for its futuristic design skills, should have come up with this terrific building. And of course the building also prompts thoughts about how styling of buildings, even supposedly very utilitarian ones like a car plant, is now a perfectly normal feature of life, as libertarian writer Virginia Postrel has already pointed out in her recently published book, The Substance of Style.

8 comments to When a factory gets groovy

  • Bernie Greene

    “I find it rather amusing that Germany, not a country which gets the credit it perhaps deserves for its futuristic design skills, should have come up with this terrific building”

    Indeed I felt much the same way and was surprised by a TV program of a couple of weeks ago that was devoted to an elderly English couple’s project to have built a Huf House designed to their specifications and part built in Germany. It was errected on site in less than 7 days and was a terrific work of art. I much admired the Huf company and it’s highly competent staff.

  • I’d be more impressed if this were a Golf (high-volume) Assembly plant, rather than a low volume luxury car, but it is pretty cool.

  • Joe

    What we see with that design is design alone. The motivation to build such a building is quite different – forced very much by socialistic ideas like we must experiment with vast sums of our shareholders money to build a showpiece “happy-healthy-proletarian on the great assembly line of the republic”.

    Aesthetically it is not terribly capitalistic at all – it’s northern european “corperate-slick” which one could only momentarily confuse with capitalism.

    It May just be the predicability of the parti and the detailing that’s making me think these things.

  • What we see with that design is design alone. The motivation to build such a building is quite different – forced very much by socialistic ideas like we must experiment with vast sums of our shareholders money to build a showpiece “happy-healthy-proletarian on the great assembly line of the republic”.

    Nonsense, it’s a marketing and prestige project from start to finish. Did you see the picture of that big glass tower filled totally with factory-delivery Phaetons? That’s a huge number of automobiles to factory deliver. Anyway, how do you know this factory, with all its cutting edge just-in-time assembly and automation, costs any more to run than a “conventional” car factory (though I doubt the Golf factory looks like the Homestead Works either)? VW didn’t get to be one of the biggest car companies in the world by being stupid pinkos.

  • Joe

    The building type is incredibly costly, Evan. There are all the usual rigidly neo-modern architectural fetishes: laminated aluminum panels, huge spans of glass, exposed structure which is the most costly to firesafe and finish, long span structure… these things aren’t required for a final assembly facility to provide just in time production and the rest of it.

    All this yields no effect, or at least one toward a specific goal. That’s a silly thing for an Owner to do, and an obscene self-indulgance for an Architect to encourage.

    It certainly is a marketing prestige project. But to whom? The customer? Probably not just the buyer. The customer wants a well designed automobile, acceleration, that sort of thing. A real capitalist wouldn’t gear an excercise to such non-benefical goals.

  • A_t

    ” The customer wants a well designed automobile, acceleration, that sort of thing. A real capitalist wouldn’t gear an excercise to such non-benefical goals.”

    Aaah.. a “real capitalist” wouldn’t see any value in such fripperies as branding then, would he. I suspect your “real capitalist” might have a hard time making much actual money in any consumer arena. Building a brand identity is vitally important to most car manufacturers. This factory projects a particular image with which VW presumably wish to associate themselves, & further it also produces fancy cars which also help to enhance the VW brand… bonus.

  • Joe

    Don’t they already have that?

  • A_t

    “Don’t they already have that?”

    … i take it you mean “a brand identity”…

    yes, of course they do, but it’s not something that’s self-sustaining. Why do you think coke etc. continue to advertise?