Leendert van der Vlugt

Leendert Cornelis van der Vlugt (13 April 1894 – 25 April 1936) was a Dutch architect in Rotterdam. In the architects office Brinkman & Van der Vlugt he was responsible for the architecture of the Van Nelle Factory, a listed monument of the UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2014.

After the death of the Rotterdam architect Michiel Brinkman in 1925, his son Johannes Brinkman, a constructional engineer, took over the architectural office and made Leendert van der Vlugt co-director. The new practice was called J.A. Brinkman & L.C. van der Vlugt, (Vlugt pronounced as "Vlücht").

The activities of the Brinkman & Van der Vlugt office lasted only about ten years because Leendert van der Vlugt has died in 1936 (Hodgkin's disease). Shortly after the death of Jan Duiker in 1935, the Netherlands lost with Leendert van der Vlugt a second young architectural talent. Both architects had created buildings of international rank: the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam by Leendert van der Vlugt and the Zonnestraal Sanatorium in Hilversum by Jan Duiker.

Since the death of Leendert van der Vlugt, there has been a misleading attribution of his work. In all books of architectural history, credit for the design of his buildings has gone to J.A. Brinkman & L.C. van der Vlugt, (sometimes together with Mart Stam). Attributions of this kind suggest that J.A. Brinkman was the creative mind in the practice. Jacob Bakema has dealt with this question in his small book "L.C. van der Vlugt". The fact that Leendert van der Vlugt was the creative architect and not Johannes Brinkman is indicated by the following quotations from Bakema's booklet:

To eliminate any misunderstandings about who was responsible for the design work, Leendert van der Vlugt's name should be placed first. The attribution of responsibility for the design of the Van Nelle Factory, for example, could be formulated as follows:

Leendert van der Vlugt (and Mart Stam) of Brinkman & Van der Vlugt Architects; or

Leendert van der Vlugt (Brinkman & Van der Vlugt)

The influence of Russian Constructivism is evident in the Van Nelle Factory. From 1926 to 1928, Mart Stam was an assistant in the office and was partly involved in the design of this project. Through his communicative skills and many connections, Mart Stam had made contact with the Russian avant-garde in Berlin in 1922. In 1926, during his first year of work for the Brinkman & Van der Vlugt office, he organized an architectural trip to the Netherlands for the Russian artist El Lissitzky and his wife Sophie Küppers, a collector of contemporary art. They visited the architects Jacobus Oud, Gerrit Rietveld, Cornelis van Eesteren and others. According to Sophie Küppers, Mart Stam told them about "his" factory in the course of the excursion. The influence of Russian Constructivism is evident at different parts of the building: the idea of using large letters on the roofs, for example. The aspect of Constructivism may possibly have come from Mart Stam. On the other hand, the fascinating rounded architectural forms (in the office tract and the roof structure) are attributable to Leendert van der Vlugt.

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