Peter Behrens

etween 1922 and 1936, peter behrens taught at the vienna academy of arts while maintaining his architectural office in Berlin. During the

1920s and 1930s, he did practically no work as a designer but was very active as an architect, producing plans very much in the spirit of the architectural avant-garde. His high-rise hoechst company office building (1920–1924) in Frankfurt is one of the most effective

examples of expressionism in architecture, while his buildings from the second half of the 1920s are modernist.

The first of these--new ways (1923–1925), a

villa in Northampton--was built for wenman joseph bassett-lowke (who had used the services of charles rennie mackintosh to design the interior of his Northampton townhouse just a few years before). new ways is considered the first modernist building in Britain. While the home has the two most essential features of the modern style--white walls and a flat roof--it also has symmetrical facades on which, if examined closely, there are here and there whimsical art-deco-style ornaments. behrens’ later buildings— for example, his work for the Weissenhof Estate, a model village near Stuttgart that was featured in one of the regular Werkbund shows (1927–1928), his apartment building in Berlin on Bolivar Allee (1930), the Hans House in Kronberg (1929–1931) and Berolina House on the

Alexanderplatz in Berlin (1929–1932) are canonical examples of “international style.”

In 1936 behrens accepted a faculty position in architecture at the prussian academy of arts in Berlin. It is common knowledge that hitler

very much admired behrens’ German Embassy building in Petersburg. Toward the end of the 1930s albert speer, with hands-on assistance from hitler, developed a plan for the rebuilding of Berlin. A key place in the new Berlin was to be occupied by a new headquarters building for aeg, and the commission was given to behrens. His sketches for this project were his last.