Van Nellefabriek

Glass, steel and daylight: the Van Nellefabriek outside Rotterdam was built in the 1920s as an 'ideal factory', its curtain-wall façades flooding the work floors with light while coffee, tea and tobacco from the tropics were processed inside. The complex beside a canal in the Spaanse Polder became an icon of interwar modernism and functionalist optimism. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in 2014.