Peter Behrens

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Behrens, painting by Max Liebermann (credit: Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin)

(born April 14, 1868, Hamburg — died Feb. 27, 1940, Berlin, Ger.) German architect and designer. He became director of Düsseldorf's arts and crafts school in 1903. The large electrical company AEG hired him in 1907 as its artistic adviser, a comprehensive job that led him to design the hexagonal trademark of the AEG, its catalogs, its office stationery, products such as electric fans and street lamps, and retail shops and factories. His AEG Works turbine factory in Berlin (1909 – 12), with its sweeping glass curtain wall, became the most significant building in Germany at that time. He was an influential pioneer of Modernism; Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe all worked in his office.

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(b Hamburg, 14 April 1868; d Berlin, 27 Feb 1940). German architect, designer and painter. Progressing from painting and graphics to product design and architecture, Behrens achieved his greatest successes with his work for the Allgemeine Elektrizit?ts-Gesellschaft (AEG), in which he reconciled the Prussian Classicist tradition with the demands of industrial fabrication.

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Peter Behrens (1868-1940) was Germany's foremost architect in the early 20th century, as well as a painter and designer. His buildings greatly influenced the architecture of the next generation in Europe.

Peter Behrens was born in Hamburg on April 14, 1868. He studied painting at the School of Art in Karlsruhe (1886-1889). He spent the 1890s in Munich as a painter and designer in the current Jugendstil, or German Art Nouveau style, and cofounded the Sezession group of artists, architects, and designers in 1893. In 1899 he joined the artists' colony on the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt, where, under the influence of J. M. Olbrich, he turned to architecture. Behrens's house at Darmstadt (1900-1901) was a characteristic Art Nouveau work.

During his tenure as director of the School of Applied Arts in Düsseldorf (1903-1907), Behrens designed a series of buildings, including the exhibition hall for the Northwestern German Art Exhibition at Oldenburg (1905). In this design, simple rectilinear geometry, plane surfaces, and incised linear decoration replaced the curvilinear forms of his residence.

In 1907 Behrens succeeded Alfred Messel as architect and designer for the German General Electric Company in Berlin. In this capacity he designed everything from company brochures, light fixtures, and electric teakettles to factory complexes. Of major importance were his industrial buildings, such as the Turbine Factory (1909), the High Tension Factory (1910), the Small Motors Factory (1910-1911), and the Large Machine Assembly Hall (1911-1912), all in Berlin, which have come to be considered as a point of departure for much of the architecture of the first half of the 20th century. The Turbine Factory, of exposed steel, concrete, and large areas of glass, was especially admired by the next generation of architects.

Some of Behrens's other works of this period, however, were firmly within the German neoclassic tradition. The best of them, such as the houses at Eppenhausen near Hagen, including the Schröder House (1908-1909) and the Cuno House (1909-1910), continued the simplicity of the Düsseldorf period. But in other buildings, such as the German Embassy in Leningrad (1911-1912), the classical style became inert and pompous. Behrens's classicism was to have its influence upon the next generation, especially upon the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

In the years following World War I, Behrens's work became expressionistic, as did, briefly, that of many German architects of the time. An example is his I. G. Farben Company Building at Höchst (1920-1924). In 1922 Behrens became professor of architecture at the Academy in Vienna; he built little of consequence after the mid-1920s. He died on Feb. 27, 1940, in Berlin.

Further Reading

The basic monographs on Behrens are old and in German. There is a chapter devoted to Behrens and his German contemporaries in Henry-Russel Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1958; 2d ed. 1963).

Additional Sources

Windsor, Alan, Peter Behrens, architect and designer, New York, N.Y.: Whitney Library of Design, 1981.

Behrens is often seen as the first designer to project a modern face, or Corporate Identity for industry, designing buildings, products, housing, showrooms, publicity material, and furniture for the German electrical manufacturer AEG from 1907 to 1914. In many ways this anticipated the model adopted by the first generation of American industrial design consultants in the 1920s and 1930s including Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy, and Norman Bel Geddes. Behrens is also widely recognized by historians as the architect-designer in whose office three key figures of European Modernism—Walter Gropius, Mies Van Der Rohe and Le Corbusier—all worked for periods between 1908 and 1911. Initially Behrens trained as a painter at the Kalsruhe School of Art from 1886 to 1889 and, during the 1890s, worked for a number of German literary and art journals including Pan. He also became a member of the Munich Secession and a founder member of the Munich Vereinigte Werkstätten in 1897. Behrens designed across a wide range of media from graphics to furniture, pottery, and metalwork. In 1899 he joined the Arts and Crafts Movement-influenced artists' colony at Darmstadt, established by Duke Kudwig II von Hessen in 1898. Behrens exhibited a house at the 1901 Darmstadt Exhibition, receiving widespread critical attention for his furniture, fittings, and interiors which, although moving away from the more flowing Art Nouveau forms that had characterized much of his earlier design output, utilized expensive materials and finishes. Commissioned by the Hamburg Museum of Applied Art Behrens designed the entrance hall and furniture for the German Pavilion at the Turin International Exhibition of Applied Art of 1902, at which he also exhibited a library commissioned by Alexander Koch. Their aesthetic ethos still reflected something of the spirit of Art Nouveau and was in marked contrast to much of his more functional work in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. During those years he moved away from a crafts outlook to one much more firmly embedded in the realities of economic, modern mass-production technologies. Behrens became director of the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts from 1903 to 1907 and introduced a number of significant changes in the curriculum, steering it towards the needs of art industry and domestic design through greater emphasis on materials, techniques, and workshop-based instruction. In June 1907 he was appointed as artistic consultant to AEG. Amongst the many architectural designs that he produced for the company the most widely reproduced is the Berlin Turbine Factory of 1908-9 although, as mentioned above, he designed kettles, lamps, electric fans, and other products, as well as shops, brochures, publicity material, and workers' housing. He also designed workers' furniture in Berlin (1912). In addition to his industrial consultancy work for AEG in the early 20th century Behrens also worked for a number of other manufacturers, including Ruckert in Mainz, Rhenische Glasshütten AG, and the Delmenhorster Linoleum Fabrik (1905-6), and produced four typefaces for the Klingspor foundry in Offenbach in 1908. In 1907 Behrens became a founder member of the Deutscher Werkbund (DWB), an organization that sought to modernize German design through the reconciliation of art and modern industrial production. He exhibited his Festival Hall at the celebrated 1914 DWB Exhibition at Cologne, a show that proved to be of considerable influence to the development of Modernism outside Germany, later designing a number of DWB pamphlets. Following a phase of Expressionist work after the war Behrens continued to design buildings with Modernist characteristics. These included his landmark New Ways house in Northampton (1923-5), the first international style house in Britain, the Viennese Pavilion Conservatory at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels and a terrace block at the DWB's Weissenhofsiedlung Exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927. Although maintaining his Berlin home and architectural practice he taught at the Vienna Academy office as professor of the Master School for Architecture (1922-36), taking on a similar role at the Berlin Academy (1936-40).

Hamburg-born artist, who became an architect under the influence of the teachings of William Morris. A founder-member of the Munich Sezession in 1893, his early graphic work was heavily influenced by Art Nouveau. From 1898 he became interested in the problems of designing mass-produced artefacts. In 1899 he was invited to Darmstadt by Ernst Ludwig II, reigning Grand Duke of Hesse (1892–1918), where he designed his own house for the artists' colony of Mathildenhöhe: incorporating a severe geometry with Gothic ogee gable and dormer-windows, it was designed as a whole, inside and out, drawing on the ideas of van de Velde and Mackintosh. From 1907 his work became more Neo-Classical: the crematorium at Delstern, near Hagen, in Westphalia (1906–7), is a good example. He became a founder of the Deutscher Werkbund and was appointed architect to the first electrical company in Berlin, the AEG, for which he designed the turbine-hall (1908–10), factories, offices, shops, workers' housing, and all manner of artefacts until 1914.

His Berlin office gained an international reputation for progressive design, and in c.1910 Le Corbusier, W. Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe all worked there. There was much that was Neo-Classical in his AEG work, and the influence of Schinkel was strong in his Haus Schröder, Hagen-Eppenhausen, Westphalia (1908), and Haus Wiegand, Berlin (1911–13). The Imperial German Embassy in St Petersburg (1911–12), a powerful essay in stripped Classicism, influenced many architects, including the Scandinavian Neo-Classicists of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1920–4 he built the offices of the I. G. Farben (now Höchst) Dyeworks in Frankfurt-am-Main, an Expressionist essay with touches of proto-Art Deco.

From 1922 Behrens was Director of the School of Architecture in the Vienna Academy of Arts, a post he held until 1936, when he became Head of the Department of Architecture of the Prussian Academy of Arts, Berlin. He designed one house in England: ‘New Ways’, 508 Wellingborough Road, Northampton (1923–5), for Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke (1877–1953), which incorporated an earlier room from 78 Derngate designed by Mackintosh in 1907. He designed the Werkbund's exhibition-house at the Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart (1927), the Villa Lewin, Schlachtsee, Berlin (1929–30), an apartment-house at Westend, Berlin (1930), and the Villa Ganz, Kronberg-in-Taunus (1931–4), all with influences from the International Modern style, which he also employed in the Austrian State Tobacco Administration block, Linz (1936—with Alexander Popp (1891–1945) ). In 1937–9 he prepared a design for Speer's north-south axis in Berlin: it was to be for a new AEG administra-tion-building in a stripped Classical style.

Bibliography

• S. Anderson (2000)
• Behrens (1901)
• Buddensieg & Rogge (1984)
• Weber (1966)
• Windsor (1981)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

For the Canadian writer, see Peter Behrens (writer).

For the German musician and member of Trio, see Peter Behrens (musician).

Peter Behrens
Portrait of Peter Behrens by Max Liebermann
Personal information
Name	Peter Behrens
Nationality	German
Birth date	April 14, 1868
Birth place	Hamburg, Germany
Date of death	February 27, 1940 (aged 71)
Work
Buildings	AEG Factory
Projects	Deutscher Werkbund

Peter Behrens (April 14, 1868 – February 27, 1940) was a German architect and designer.

Biography

industrial clock designed by Behrens for AEG in 1909

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 book-binder in a sort of artisanal way. He frequented the bohemian circles and was interested in subjects related to the reform of life-styles. 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 house and fully conceived everything inside the house (furniture, 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 moved away from the Jugendstil towards a sober and austere style of design. He was one of the leaders of architectural reform at the turn of the century and was a major designer of factories and office buildings in brick, steel and glass. In 1903, Behrens was named director of the Kunstgewerberschule in Düsseldorf, where he implemented successful reforms. 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 with a decidedly modern twist. 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. Behrens' work for AEG was the first large-scale demonstration of the viability and vitality of the Werkbund's initiatives and objectives.

AEG Turbine Factory, 1910

In 1907, AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gessellschaft) retained Behrens as artistic consultant. He designed the entire corporate identity (logotype, product design, publicity, etc.) and for that he is considered the first industrial designer in history. Peter Behrens was never an employee for AEG, but worked in the capacity of artistic consultant. In 1910, Behrens designed the AEG Turbine Factory. From 1907 to 1912, he had students and assistants, and among them were Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Adolf Meyer, Jean Kramer and Walter Gropius (later to become the first director of the Bauhaus.) In 1922, he accepted an invitation to teach at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna.Peter Behrens remained head of the Department of Architecture at the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. In 1936 Behrens was called from Vienna to conduct a Master class in architecture, in succession to Hans Poelzig, at the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin, reportedly with the specific approval of Hitler. Behrens became associated with Hitler's urbanistic dreams for Berlin with the commission for the new head quarters 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 and the academy helped his cause by reporting to the Ministry that Behrens had early joined the then illegal Nazi party in Austria on May Day of 1934. The vast AEG building with its marshalled fenestrations and detailing, like the project of which it was a part, mercifully was not built. War ensued instead. Behrens, seeking refuge from the cold of his country estate, died in Berlin's Hotel Bristol on 27 February 1940.^[1]

Peter Behrens was a pioneer in everything he did in the first half of the 20th century and his ideas were spread around the world by his students, especially by Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. The creation of the concept of corporate identity (see also: Corporate design) had a direct influence in other post WWII companies such as Braun (company) or McDonald's.

References

1. ^ Stanford Anderson: "Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century", page 252. The MIT Press 2000.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Peter Behrens

• Virtual gallery with Behrens designs for AEG
• The synagogue of Zilina, Slovakia designed by Peter Behrens

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