Brinkman & Van der Vlugt was a Rotterdam architecture practice of the Dutch modern movement, the Nieuwe Bouwen. When the Rotterdam architect Michiel Brinkman died in 1925, his son Johannes Brinkman (1902–1949), a civil engineer, took over the office and made the architect Leendert van der Vlugt (1894–1936) his partner. The partnership lasted only about ten years, until Van der Vlugt died of Hodgkin's disease in 1936. Credit for its designs has long gone to the firm, or to Brinkman, but the Van Nelle company's director and the designer Mart Stam, who worked in the office, both said Van der Vlugt was the creative architect, and the writer Jacob Bakema argued his name should come first.
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The Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam (1931), designed by Van der Vlugt with Mart Stam, is claimed to have the world's first industrially prefabricated curtain wall; Le Corbusier called it "the most beautiful spectacle of the modern age", and it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2014. The Sonneveld House in Rotterdam (1933) followed, and the Bergpolderflat (1934), a block of flats designed with Willem van Tijen, won international recognition.
