Peter Behrens

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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

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.