Johannes Andreas Brinkman

(b Rotterdam, 22 March 1902; d Rotterdam, 6 April 1949). Son of (1) M. Brinkman. He studied road and waterworks construction at the Technische Hogeschool, Delft. He joined his father's firm in 1921 and became head of it following the latter's death. At the instigation of his client and friend C. H. van der Leeuw, a director of the Van Nelle concern, Brinkman employed in 1925 the more experienced Leendert Cornelis van der Vlugt (1894-1936) to assist in the ongoing project for the Van Nelle Factory (1925-31) in Rotterdam. Van der Vlugt and Brinkman were both members of the avant-garde group DE OPBOUW, and the project was marked by an unusual amount of collaboration between client and architects. Van der Vlugt, who had studied at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen, Rotterdam, had already designed a technical school in Groningen (1922; with Jan Wiebenga (1886-1974)), with an early use of glass curtain-walls. His design for the Van Nelle Factory (see fig.), on which Mart Stam also collaborated, came to be regarded as one of the most representative of its age for its combination of specific functional role, progressive building technology and unified aesthetic image. Van der Leeuw's requests for provision of hygiene, recreation and open-plan work areas were translated by the architects into basic, functionally defined forms, in which van der Vlugt sought to harmonize the contrasts between horizontal and vertical, open and closed, round and rectangular. The curved office building, the round tea-room on the roof and the transport bridges between the dispatch section and the factory are the salient elements of the composition. The non-structural glass fa?ades serve to maximize natural lighting and visibility of the workspace and to reveal the reinforced-concrete pillars that form the constructional system. The design united a number of sources of inspiration: most notably De Stijl, in its use of primary colours, and the works of Johaness Duiker and Le Corbusier, who saw the factory in 1932 and approvingly called it 'a creation of the modern age'.

Part of the Brinkman family

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Rotterdam-born architect, who was in partnership from 1925 to 1936 with Leendert Cornelius van der Vlugt (1894–1936) and, from 1937 to 1948, with van den Broek. The firm produced the celebrated van Nelle tobacco-factory, Rotterdam (1926–30), on which Mart Stam also worked. Regarded as one of the purest Constructivist buildings of the period, as well as a pioneering example of Modern architecture, it was a mushroom-columned reinforced-concrete structure with large areas of curtain-walling, and freely expressed ramped connections crossing backwards and forwards between the factory-block and the warehouse in glazed elevated bridges. Brinkman and van der Vlugt collaborated with Willem van Tijen (1894–1974) on the design of the slab-shaped Bergpolder high-rise residential block in Rotterdam (1933–4), one of the earliest buildings on the piloti base made fashionable by Le Corbusier.

Bibliography

• Curtis (1996)
• Geurst & Molenaar (1993)
• J.Joedicke (1963a, 1976)
• M&N (1987)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)