IT’S been a long while since anyone romanticised mass production. These days it’s regarded as a devilish thing, to be shoved out of sight to sweat factories in Shanghai. It smacks too much of Friedrich Engels, or Henry Ford ruthlessly ruling his factory with a stopwatch. But there was a time when the production line was fantasised about as a thing of beauty and liberation, not oppression. Probably sometime around the Futurists or early Modernism, when the sight of a well-oiled factory could wring a tear from the eye of the Gradgrindest of industrial magnates.
But if anyone today can still find romance in a machine, it’s Zaha Hadid. In the 1970s Hadid rejected both Post-Modern historicist kitsch and the failed utopias of “first” Modernism to think up a new “super-Modernism”, with all the romance of those early days before the cynicism set in. Hadid rhapsodised about Modernism’s roots, holding close to her heart Kasimir Malevich’s words: “We can only perceive space when we break free from the Earth, when the point of support disappears.”
Her energetic architecture follows suit, with aerodynamic buildings such as the ski jump at Innsbruck, that look as if they should be accompanied by revolutionary manifestoes and exclamation marks.
Factories, then, loaded as they are with allusions to early, optimistic Modernism, should be right up Hadid’s alley. Architecturally, too, they are a gift. A factory is a line, a process — and no architect today likes lines as much as Hadid does. She dresses head to foot in Issey Miyake ploughlines, and her buildings are composed of the same coursing go-faster stripes, whose splintering geometry and perspective trick the eye into thinking buildings have indeed broken free of the Earth. And what better type of factory to embody this than a car factory — an endlessly rolling production line whose very product seems as if it might drive off the conveyor belt at the end — as indeed it did in Giacomo Mattè Trucco’s 1915 Lingotto Fiat factory in Turin, with its loop-the-loop piled spirals emerging on to a roof-top racetrack for freshly born cars to take their first faltering zoom, still the Futurist architectural fantasy par excellence?
Hadid’s £37 million Central Building for the new BMW factory in Leipzig, opened by Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, last month, may be dwarfed by the vast monolithic sheds of the new £1.3 billion plant that surrounds it, but it sure packs a punch.
In plan it’s a lightning bolt. In elevation it’s a giant crouching arrow, seemingly ready to break free of the earth and its dull neighbours if it weren’t tethered to the ground with taut concrete columns.
Inside, too, it’s all movement, literally — since it’s composed, like Lingotto, around the production line itself, hung from the ceiling, loaded with cars, coursing silently and relentlessly through the building — and metaphorically, Hadid’s interlocking lines, dizzying ramps, terraces and stairs and tricky games of perspective writhing all about you. It apes Lingotto’s oomph and its folding assembly-line ribbons but goes one further: the straight, monotonous production line now not only loops and shoots off but doubles back and fractures in complex, sometimes a little confusing and over-complex, interlocking geometries; the factory becomes not a dreary creator of standardised products watched over by robots, but an heroic and humane place of architectural thrills.
If the sheds are the muscles of the factory, where the graft is done (most, admittedly, by robots), Hadid’s building is both its collective heart and nerve centre. All workers have to pass through it, and it’s where the canteen and other collective activities are housed. It is also where the boffins and management live, where the bigwigs are entertained, where the products are showcased. So the production line that courses through its concrete chasm is partly symbolic. All are meant to bow down — even while gobbling lunch in the canteen — before the seamless product as it is paraded, pirouetting, on its invisible pedestal.
The building is also a giant quality-control instrument: the 650 3 Series Beamers that are pumped out each day pass through between paint shop, body shop and assembly shop and before the eyes of workers, management and engineering boffins, who, every now and then, pop out of their concrete eyries to pluck out substandard products, subject them to tests and parade failures to chastise the workforce.
This is obviously architecture-as-marketing. Luxury-car manufacturers, as much as opera companies and department stores, have long understood architecture’s role as a provider of bling to impress the punters. BMW itself has the madcap Austrians Coop Himmelblau designing its new BMW World next to its Munich HQ, ready for the massive marketing opportunity that is next year’s football World Cup. The Dutch firm UN Studio is designing a Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart whose vortex shape apes Lingotto’s spirals.
But Hadid’s building is also meant to embody those old Modernist chestnuts, utopianism, social progressiveness and even social engineering. It’s not just the production lines that come together in a knot here, but, supposedly, workers and management, blue and white collar. It is that old Modernist stalwart, a social condenser, envisaged by architects as a melting pot.
Well, kind of. The plant’s biggest contribution to worker happiness is providing jobs at all. Leipzig, the “city of heroes”, birthplace of East Germany’s liberation in 1989, has fared better than most of the old GDR, but unemployment is still at 20 per cent. Germany as a whole is trying to shift its image from Old Europe to New and high hopes are pinned on this plant, with its flexible methods and organisation and flexible (ie, less bolshie), less well-paid, less cushioned workforce, kept on their toes by the Polish workers streaming across the border.
It’s a progressive factory, then, but hardly Karl Marx. I can’t imagine chief execs and trainee grease-monkeys sharing cappuccinos and peace and harmony spreading out across the land. But there’s a degree of egalitarianism: the quality of the spectacle is evenly distributed; the intertwining departments and hierarchies and spaghetti geometry both allow social interaction and demystify the workplace.
So many workplaces are utilitarian, dehumanising, architectural and organisational labyrinths that breed subcultures of misinformation, bitterness and gossip at the watercooler. Here, everything and everyone is laid bare; the process and product are visible and understandable; the common goals are self evident. And if you’re sacked for not being a team player, at least there’s a gorgeous door to walk out of.
FACTORY DESIGNS THAT PUT ART INTO BUSINESS
THE landmark Manningham Mills in Bradford (1838) is an early precursor to the phenomenon of “beautiful factories”. Long derelict, it is being turned into flats by the architects Urban Splash.
“Architecture is 90 per cent business and 10 per cent art,” claimed the architect Albert Kahn. His 1909 Detroit factory for Ford revolutionised not just production but attitudes to industrial architecture. The world’s first “rational” factory, the home to the legendary Ford Model T, organised manufacture in sequence. The building was six storeys high, and the car’s assembly took place from top to bottom, rolling out on the ground floor.
In Europe, Peter Behrens’s AEG turbine factory (1910) was equally influential. Considered the classic example of early Modernism’s desire to link past with present and marry functionalism with beauty, it’s the poster boy of “industrial classicism”.
In England, the Art Deco Firestone Factory (1929) in West London marked a return of appliqué decoration. The public outcry at its destruction in 1980 led to 20th-century industrial architecture finally being listed.
The Modernist fusion of architecture and engineering returned in earnest with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson’s Wax Building in Wisconsin (1939).
The 1970s saw the rise of the “high-tech/giant shed” architecture of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, epitomised by Foster’s Renault distribution centre in Swindon. Over the past decade factories have got sexy again, Volkswagen's Gläserne Manufaktur in Dresden, where you can watch your car being assembled, has been described as part factory, part art gallery.
