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ehrens started work with Berlin-based aeg (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft) in 1906. By the next year he was the factory’s artistic 

consultant. behrens designed all of aeg’s graphic materials (advertisements, exhibit brochures, catalogs, the covers of the firm’s magazine), devised the firm’s new logo, designed factory buildings for it in various cities (the turbine factory in Berlin, 1908–1910, is the

best known) and exposition pavilions. In short, he was the first person in history to create a thoroughgoing corporate graphic style.

 

 

In addition, he worked on aeg’s products: lamps, clocks, fans, electric kettles. And behrens did more than sketch their outlines.

He took a hand in the engineering itself, standardizing subassemblies to make them interchangeable. This was true industrial design.

Heater, designed by behrens for aeg, 1920.

Photo courtesy of Quittenbaum

 

“Industrial design” as a term, of course, did not

yet exist. It first came into regular use, in the United States, toward the end of the decade of 1910–1920 and, as the name of a profession, only in the early 1930s. By the late 1930s, the use of the term had spread to Britain, but it was not until the middle of the century that it reached beyond the English-speaking world. 

Ventilator, aeg, designed by peter 

behrens, 1908. Photo courtesy of aeg

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ehrens was active in Berlin as an independent architect. In addition to factories, he also designed show pavilions for various clients,

mansions (including the Wiegand House in Berlin, 1911–1913), the Mannesmann office tower in Dusseldorf (1911–1912) and, finally, the most famous and grandest of his structures, the German Embassy on Isaakievskiy Square in Petersburg, Russia (1911–1913).

 

 

 

German Embassy in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, 1913

During this period, too, behrens worked as a

designer for other firms (Ruckert, Rhenische Glasshütten, Delmenhorster Linoleum Fabrik) and created typefaces for the Klingspor printery, the best

known of which is his Behrens Antikva (1907–1909), which was used for the aeg logo and most of its printed materials.

 

 

 

All of behrens’ work from the end of the first decade of the 20th century through the beginning of the second—from the factory

buildings to the typefaces—has a remarkable stylistic unity. In Munich and Darmstadt, behrens had been an artist of art nouveau. He was now a classicist. But his classicism was his own: the proportions and details of the columns of the embassy in Petersburg are not canonical; the metal ribs of the aeg turbine factory hardly betray their origin as caryatids. behrens rethought the classical canon, eliminating all non-essential detail in favor of the clarity and mathematical beauty of proportions, the firmness of contours, the emphatic solidity of the construction and the visible connection of the parts.

Behrens Antiqua Initialen font, 1908

 

aeg turbine factory in Berlin, built by 

peter behrens in 1909. © Getty Images

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aeg turbine factory in Berlin, built by 

peter behrens in 1909. © Getty Images