Peter Behrens

Peter Behrens 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 was born in Hamburg in 1868. He studied painting in his native city, 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, he was named director of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Düsseldorf. In 1907 he joined the Deutscher Werkbund and became its vice president under Hermann Muthesius. In the same year he was hired by Emil Rathenau as artistic consultant for AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft), one of Germany's largest industrial companies at that time. In this position he designed many products for AEG such as electric fans, kettles, lamps and clocks. He also designed their trademark logo and corporate identity. He is considered one of the pioneers of industrial design. Behrens' most famous architectural work is the AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin-Moabit (1908-1909), which is regarded as an icon of early modernist architecture. The building's functionalist design expressed both the modern image of AEG as a company and its innovative use of electricity. The hall's steel and glass structure was influenced by Behrens' admiration for American engineering works. Behrens had a significant influence on modern architecture not only through his own buildings, but also through his teaching and mentoring of young architects. He taught at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin from 1907 to 1911, and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1922 to 1936. Among his students and assistants were Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Adolf Meyer, Jean Kramer and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. These architects later became some of the most prominent figures of the modernist movement. Behrens died of a heart attack in Berlin in 1940, while he was working on the plans for the German embassy in Moscow. He was buried in Neustadt an der Weinstraße, where he had built a summer house for himself and his second wife Lilli von Mendelssohn in 1929.