Haribo Factory

Haribo’s gummy bears have symbolized a seemingly innocent and colorful world of joy for over a century. Children and adults alike associate them with lightheartedness, innocence, and playful pleasure. Yet Theodor W. Adorno, one of the sharpest critics of the culture industry, would have seen in this cheerful sweetness the mechanisms of mass production and standardized desires. Haribo is not merely a brand—it is a global emblem of the consumer culture that, according to Adorno, contributes to the disenfranchisement of the individual. All the more remarkable, then, is the challenge taken on by Tuncer Cakmakli Architects (TCA) in designing a new Haribo factory—not as a mere machine for production, but as a spatial response rooted in social and urban responsibility.

TCA approaches this task with a stance that does not affirm Adorno’s critique, but rather confronts it: not by celebrating the culture industry, but by offering an architectural ethic centered on reflection, care, and quality. The new Haribo production site is more than a functional facility—it is an attempt to soften the alienation that Adorno saw as inherent to late capitalism, at least within the scale of the workplace.

The architectural structure of the factory is designed for maximum hygiene and efficiency—an essential requirement in food production. But TCA goes beyond technical necessities. Through natural lighting, clear circulation, and open spatial configurations, an atmosphere is created that fosters not only productivity but also a sense of well-being. Employees here are not merely part of an anonymous assembly system; they are participants in a space that grants them dignity and spatial quality. This is a quiet resistance to what Adorno described as the “administration of human beings” in the modern working world.

TCA also acts with care on the urban scale. The factory is not placed as an isolated industrial object that imposes itself on its surroundings, but rather as part of a whole—respectful of scale, materiality, and context. This sensitivity to the environment becomes an act of architectural attentiveness—almost a dialogue with the landscape instead of a monologue of dominance. In this way, the architecture resists the logic of cultural uniformity that Adorno so critically examined.

Of course, a contradiction remains: Can a factory that produces mass-market goods ever truly be a site of critical reflection? TCA does not respond with theory, but with form, space, and atmosphere. In a time when industrial buildings are often seen as faceless necessities, this factory draws a different picture—one that understands the quality of space as part of collective well-being.

Thus, an architecture emerges that may not resolve Adorno’s skepticism toward the culture industry but takes it seriously—by giving the human being within the machine a place. The new Haribo factory is therefore not just a site of production, but a space of architectural responsibility.