LEADER: INDUSTRY AND AFTER

If only British industry had company bosses like Professor Ludwig Georg Braun. The B Braun company in central Germany has been going for 170 years, in private family hands throughout, and is now globally important in its sector: the near-invisible but vital business of making medical equipment for hospitals and clinics.

B Braun innovates constantly and has made its main plant so efficient that it competes head-to-head with China’s low manufacturing costs. But this doesn’t mean Professor Braun skimps on his buildings. On the contrary, he has spent more than 20 years assembling a showpiece factory and headquarters complex for his company. Over that time, this ‘city of industry’, as he calls it,  has faithfully followed the masterplan originally laid down in the late 1980s by Stirling Wilford with Walter Nägeli. It has been expanded at intervals and is now nearing its planned completion – today in the hands of Wilford Schupp, as we report on page 26.

Braun is one of Germany’s richest men and employs 38,000 people in 50 countries, but he was happy to stop and talk unprompted about such details as the quality of fairfaced concrete in his enviable HQ, or his desire to open it to the public. He believes the complex has not only done good things for the image of his company, but has helped to improve standards in the German building industry by raising the quality threshold. Meanwhile architects in Britain can only dream of the level of craftsmanship already present in the German system.

B Braun, however, was built on a greenfield site. The reason this issue is titled ‘Industry and after’ is that the pressing concern for most western nations is not so much building for industry, as building in its footprints, and that means brownfield. So we also look at the places and uses which have the difficult task of replacing industry – a Libeskind theatre in Dublin’s docklands, a civic centre in Corby’s former steelworks, a bespoke headquarters in a Bedfordshire brickworks, and the large-scale replanning of a former Welsh military airfield. Industrial or post-industrial, it is all to do with the architecture of transformation.

Hugh Pearman | Editor