Peter Behrens

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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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ies van der rohe, who worked under Behrens for a considerable time, has made clear that Behrens was interested in Etruscan vases.
And the objects that he designed for aeg have something in them of classical vases, not necessarily Etruscan: they have the same “base” and “eave,” the same differentiation between weight-bearing and non-weight-bearing parts. The metal body of behrens’ clock might well serve as the base of a column. The behrens’ electric kettle sits on a pediment. All the designs draw heavily on architecture.

Architect ludwig mies van der rohe, 1956.
© frank schersche
 

Electric kettle, designed by behrens for aeg, 1913.
Photo courtesy of Auktionshaus HERR
 

As already noted, three future greats of the 
“modern movement” in architecture worked under peter behrens: le corbusier, who then still called himself charles-edouard jeanneret-gris; ludwig mies van der rohe, and walter gropius. corbusier worked in the behrens studio only a short time, from October 1910 until March 1911; mies was there from the autumn of 1908 to the middle of 1910 and again from May 1911 until early 1912, and gropius was with behrens from late 1907 until the middle of 1910.
The two future German modernists, thus, did not have the opportunity to meet le corbusier in the behrens shop.

It is hard to pinpoint the effects of the exposure to behrens on mies, who until the mid-1920s was not part of the “modern”
movement at all, as it is with respect to le corbusier, for whom the Berlin experience was one of many accumulated in his youthful tour of Europe. But the effect on gropius is undeniable. The behrens shop specialized in the design of factory buildings, and the young gropius chose factory design as his own special field. He wrote a book on contemporary factory architecture, and when he opened his own architectural studio in 1910, with adolf meyer, another “graduate” of the behrens shop, they began with factories, in 1910–1911 designing the exemplary faguswerk in Alfeld-an-der-Leine, and in 1914 the model office and factory building shown at the werkbund exhibition in Cologne.

walter gropius his wife and le corbusier at 
the cafe des deux magots in Paris, 1923. © Getty Images

Fagus Factory in Alfeld, circa 1912
 
 

behrens also had a hand in the Cologne exhibition: he designed one of the pavilions and created its most famous poster.

Fagus Factory in Alfeld.
Photo courtesy of Fagus-GreCon