Page 206 - Beyond Decommissioning

Experience and lessons learned 187

Fig. 6.17 Yenidze Factory,
Dresden, Germany.
Photo by M. Laraia.

and former mayor of the city, bought the building with the plan to regenerate it as a
creative, mixed-use community building. It is now houses Thali Cafe, animation and
performing arts school, lofts, a caf e bar, offices and a theatre (Tobacco Factory, 2018).
The Yenidze Tobacco and Cigarette Factory, Dresden, Germany, was a tobacco
company, which imported tobacco from Ottoman Yenidze town (now Genisea,
Greece). This Dresden factory was built between 1907 and 1909. The “Oriental” style
of architecture, which borrows design elements from mosques, recalled the exotic ori-
gins of the Oriental tobaccos and functioned as advertising for the firm (Fig. 6.17).
Today Yenidze is used as an office building. It has 600 windows of various styles;
the dome is 20 m high. The history of the factory can be found in Yenidze (n.d.).
Although not a tobacco factory, the Vienna Zacherlfabrik should be quoted here
because, like Yenidze, it was built in the style of an Arabic mosque (Fig. 6.18).
Zacherlfabrik is a former factory for insecticides. The Oriental-style factory was built
between 1888 and 1892. Business started to decline after WWI and, despite endeavors
to diversify production, eventually in 1958 the company was cancelled from the reg-
istry of active enterprises. The pseudo-mosque of the Zacherlfabrik remained mostly
unused; parts of it fell into disrepair, others were let to companies, others yet served as
storage space. A new beginning for the Zacherlfabrik came to light only a few
years ago.