Though the new Vestre furniture factory outside Oslo claims to be the world’s most sustainable factory, a more defendable title is that it’s the first to be influenced by Saturday morning cartoons.
“It was mesmerizing to watch these processes,” Ingels says by phone from Copenhagen. He decided to build that same sense of wonder directly into the factory itself.
Between the company’s main raw material outside and the processed wooden furniture inside are walls of clear glass, a literal nod to transparency. Like those Saturday morning television programs, the glass gives the curious public a way to peek behind the scenes. “You can press your nose flat against the windows and admire the marvel of 21st-century manufacturing,” says Ingels, whose firm is known for genre-blurring buildings like a power plant with a ski slope on top and dome structures 3D printed from moon dust.
“Normally, factories are these hostile, hermetic, no-trespassing, keep-out kinds of environments,” Ingels says. And with good reason: Companies have a natural concern for industrial espionage, as well as the workaday realities of needing to keep up production without a bunch of onlookers clogging the gears.
Vestre’s intention of pulling back the curtain could only go so far, and while most parts of the factory can be seen from the outside, the robotic arms and spinning saw blades in the work areas are just for employees. “Of course, it is still a factory,” Ingels says. “It’s a hardworking building.”
“It took some convincing,” Ingels says. “The first response from the German manufacturer was unmöglich, which means impossible.” The designers eventually got their way, and Vestre’s factory now includes a lime green room for painting and a bright red saw for cutting large boards. The scene inside is not unlike what a factory might have looked like in one of those old technicolor Saturday morning cartoons.
The building was constructed primarily of wood, with columns, beams, and walls made of mass timber, insulation made of low-carbon wood chips, and a facade of insect-resistant charred wood. The concrete foundation was cut down to the minimum size possible to still hold up the building, and the designers negotiated with the local fire department to remove as few trees as possible between the building’s edge and the forest beyond.
“Every decision in the building has really been made with a clear focus on what is the smartest, simplest way to reduce the carbon footprint,” Ingels says.
Large stairways line these windows both inside and outside, creating spaces for workers to move across floors and for visitors to peer in. At the top of the stairs is a rooftop deck looking out on the solar-paneled green roofs of the building’s four wings and the forest that spreads out beyond.
