PETER

BEHRENS
1868-1940
• Peter Behrens (14 April 1868 – 27 February 1940) was
a leading German architect, graphic and industrial designer, best known for
his early pioneering AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin in 1909. He had a long
career, designing objects, typefaces, and important buildings in a range of styles
from the 1900s to the 1930s. He was a foundation member of the German
Werkbund in 1907, when he also began designing for AEG, pioneered
corporate design, graphic design, producing typefaces, objects, and buildings for
the company. In the next few years, he became a successful architect, a leader of
the rationalist / classical German Reform Movement of the 1910s. After WW1 he
turned to Brick Expressionism, designing the remarkable Hoechst
Administration Building outside Frankfurt, and from the mid 1920s increasingly
to New Objectivity. He was also an educator, heading the architecture school
at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1922 to 1936. As a well known architect he
produced design across Germany, in other European countries, Russia and
England. Several of the leading names of European modernism worked for him
when they were starting out in the 1910s, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le
Corbusier and Walter Gropius.
• Behrens attended the Christianeum Hamburg from September 1877 until Easter
1882. He studied painting in his native Hamburg, as well as
in Düsseldorf and Karlsruhe, from 1886 to 1889. In 1890, he married Lilly Kramer
and moved to Munich. At first, he worked as
a painter, illustrator and bookbinder in an artisanal fashion. He frequented
the bohemian circles and was interested in subjects related to the reform of
lifestyles. In 1899 Behrens accepted the invitation of the Grand Duke Ernst-
Ludwig of Hesse to be the second member of his recently inaugurated Darmstadt
Artists' Colony, where Behrens built his own Jugendstil style house in 1901, and
fully conceived everything, from furniture to towels, paintings, pottery, etc. The
building of this house is considered to be the turning point in his life, when he left
the artistic circles of Munich and showed himself to be a talented architect in his
very first project.
• In 1903, Behrens was named director of the Kunstgewerbeschule in
Düsseldorf, where he implemented successful reforms, developing new ways of
teaching design. In 1907, Behrens and ten other people (Hermann
Muthesius, Theodor Fischer, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Bruno
Paul, Richard Riemerschmid, Fritz Schumacher, among others), plus twelve
companies, gathered to create the German Werkbund. As an organization, it was
clearly indebted to the principles and priorities of the Arts and Crafts movement,
but tending towards the classical in architecture. Members of the Werkbund
were focused on improving the overall level of taste in Germany by improving
the design of everyday objects and products. This very practical aspect made it
an extremely influential organization among industrialists, public policy
experts, designers, investors, critics and academics. His work in the early 1900s
included a series of exhibition halls and pavilions, a crematorium and some
private houses, which show a new direction immediately after his own
Jugendstil house, towards exploring simple, rectilinear volumes and classical
sources.
• In 1907, AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft) retained Behrens as artistic
consultant, and his work for AEG was the first large-scale demonstration of the
viability and vitality of the Werkbund's initiatives and objectives. He designed the
entire corporate identity (logotype, product design, publicity, etc.) and for that he
is considered the first industrial designer in history. He also designed a series of
factory buildings for them at their two Berlin factory sites, most famously the
1909 AEG Turbine Factory, at the Moabit site, considered an early example of
Modernism. He then went on to design four new buildings at
the Humboldthain site, which showed that he was as much interested in massive,
bold, classical and picturesque effects depending on the context, as expressing
modernity. Since Peter Behrens was a consultant rather than an employee of AEG,
he was free to work on other projects, and developed a highly successful
architectural practice. In this period his growing office had many students and
assistants, some who would go on become leading Modernists, including Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Adolf Meyer, Jean Kramer and Walter
Gropius (later to become the first director of the Bauhaus).
• Immediately after the AEG Turbine Hall, he designed a series of large office
buildings in a bold monumental stripped classical form, part of the
German Reform Architecture movement. His 1912 German Embassy in St
Petersburg, and the Administration Building for Continental AG in Hannover, built
1912-1914 are good examples of this period.
• After WW1 his work changed again, and like many German architects, he
explored the themes and styles of Brick Expressionism. Between 1920 and 1924,
he was responsible for the design and construction of the Technical
Administration Building of Hoechst AG in Höchst, outside Frankfurt. With its
soaring atrium clad in coloured bricks representing the factory’s dye products,
and an exterior in dark clinker bricks with clocktower and dramatic arch, it is one
of the most representative examples of the style in Germany.
• In 1922, he accepted an invitation to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna,
becoming head of the architecture school, a post he kept until 1936, whilst also
designing for a range of clients across Europe. In 1926, Behrens was
commissioned by the Englishman Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke to design a
family home in Northampton, UK. The house named 'New Ways', a stark
white walled rectangular volume (with jagged parapets), is often regarded as
probably the first modernist house in Britain, and marks Behrens' turn towards
the Modernism of New Objectivity.
• In 1925 he was invited by his former student Mies van der Rohe, along with many
of the leading German architects working in the new style, to design a residential
building in Stuttgart, in the development now known as the Weissenhof. His
contribution was a set of apartments in stacked cubic volumes, allowing many
apartments to open to large terraces.
• In 1928 Behrens won an international competition for the construction of
the New Synagogue, in Zilnia, Czechia, which was restored in 2012-17 as a
cultural centre. The same year he designed a renovation of the Feller-Stern
department store in central Zagreb, Croatia, transforming it from Art Nouveau to
a complex almost De Stijl Modernist composition. His 1931 hillside villa for the
Clara Gans, daughter of Frankfurt industrialist Adolf Gans, was a similarly complex
interplay of rectangular volumes, clad in stone, a fine example of New Objectivity.
• In 1929, Behrens was invited to the competition for the design of buildings
around a proposed radical redesign of Alexanderplatz in Berlin, and though he
came second, his designs for the buildings on the south west side of the new
square was preferred by the subsequent developer,and the Alexanderhaus and
the Berolinahaus were built by 1932.
• In 1929, Behrens, in partnership with former student Alexander Popp, was
commissioned to design a new factory for the state-run Austria Tabak in Linz,
which was built over a long period, due to the economic conditions, finally
completed in 1935. The main building has a very long completely horizontal
slightly curved facade, Behrens’ most striking design in the style of New
Objectivity.
• In 1936 Behrens left Vienna to teach architecture at the Prussian Academy of Arts
(now the Akademie der Künste) in Berlin, reportedly with the specific approval
of Hitler. Behrens participated in Hitler's plans for the rebuilding of Berlin with
the commission for the new headquarters of the AEG on Albert Speer's famous
planned north–south axis. Speer reported that his selection of Behrens for this
commission was rejected by the powerful Alfred Rosenberg, but that his decision
was supported by Hitler who admired Behrens's Saint Petersburg Embassy.
Behrens died in the Hotel Bristol in Berlin on 27 February 1940, while seeking
refuge there from his country estate.
 • AEG Turbine Factory, 1908–1909, in
the Moabit district of Berlin. An early
example of industrial classicism
• Atrium, Hoechst, Frankfurt, 1924
• German Embassy St Petersburg, 1912
• 'Weissenhof' apartment building,
Stuttgart, 1927
SOME OF HIS • Alexanderhaus and Berolinahaus,
FAMOUS WORKS Alexanderplatz, 1932
• Tabacco Factory, Linz, 1929-35
AEG turbine factory
• The AEG turbine factory was built in 1909, at Huttenstraße 12-16 in
the Berlin district of Moabit. It is the best-known work of architect Peter
Behrens. The 100m long steel framed building with 15m tall glass windows on
either side is considered the first attempt to introduce restrained modern design
to industrial architecture. It was a bold move, and world first that would have a
durable impact on architecture as a whole.
The Technical Administration Building
• The Technical Administration Building (German: Technisches Verwaltungsgebäude) of Hoechst
AG is an expressionist office building by the architect Peter Behrens on the site of the
former Hoechst company in Frankfurt-Höchst in the German state of Hesse. It is also referred to
as the Peter Behrens Building (Peter-Behrens-Bau) by the operator of the Höchst Industrial Park,
as the site of the former Hoechst works has been called since the merger of Hoechst AG and
other companies and the subsequent abandonment of the traditional corporate name. The
building had worldwide fame in a stylised form as part as the Hoechst company's tower and
bridge (Turm und Brücke) logo from 1947 to 1997.