Peter Behrens

Architect, German
Peter Behrens was one of the most prolific architects of his generation. He created
buildings ranging from embassies, monuments, bridges, churches, and giant factories to
domestic houses, workers’ estates, and apartment blocks. He also became the first
industrial designer in the modern sense; he was responsible for mass-produced furniture,
textiles, cutlery, ceramics, and glass in addition to his well-known range of electrical
appliances for the AEG, or General Electric Company. His graphic work was enormously
successful, and he was active in theater design, calligraphy, and typography. He was a
teacher and a writer, and he had a strong influence on the development of his assistants,
who were to become the most celebrated architects of the next generation. Behrens was
born in St. Georg, Hamburg, and he was the son of a landowner who did not marry his
mother. Both his parents died when he was young, and he was reared by a guardian from
the age of 14. On leaving school in Altona in 1886, he chose to study art and attended the
Gewerbeschule, Hamburg, and the Kunstschule, Karlsruhe, until 1889, before becoming
first a pupil of Ferdinand Brütt in Düsseldorf and then of Hugo Kotschenreiter in Munich.
Behrens went through various phases in his painting style; at first he was influenced by
the realist and impressionist work of Dutch-German and Dutch artists, such as Wilhelm
Leibl and Max Liebermann, before turning to studio compositions of a more symbolist
approach. Behrens never sought or acquired formal qualifications as an architect. In the
later 1890s, while still living in Munich, he executed a number of woodcuts in a flat,
linear style and became drawn into the group that formed the Vereinigten Werkstätten für
Kunst im Handwerk, designing and exhibiting ceramics, glass, jewelry, furniture, and
women’s clothing. His large woodcut, Der Kus s (1898), became one of the best-known images of
Jugendstil, or German Art Nouveau.
In July 1899, as a result of his reputation as an artist and designer, he was invited to
join the artists’ colony at Darmstadt, which was being established under the patronage of
Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hessen. This colony was planned and launched with ducal,
government, and industrial support to stimulate the role of applied art in the local
economy and to bring prestige to the city. The seven artists brought together at Darmstadt
were to be a free creative community, and to exhibit their work regularly; they were to
live in houses designed by the Austrian architect Joseph Maria Olbrich, with the
exception of Behrens, who designed his own.
This house, his first, was to accommodate himself, his wife, and their two young
children. It was intended, like the other houses of the Künstlerkolonie (artists’ colony), to be at once a
dwelling and a permanent exhibit of the new architecture, a statement of a way of living
and a model of style.
Behrens’s house is basically cubic in form, with a red-tiled pyramidal roof. A gable
dominates the main facade, and the plain white walls are relieved with decorative pilaster
strips, quoins, and architraves in molded green-glazed bricks. Internally, the ground floor
is comprised of an entrance hall with wide sliding screens that open into a music room
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 228
that in turn connect to a dining room, so that virtually the whole space can be unified
when desired. The studio is a principal room upstairs. Behrens designed all the interior
decorations—the furniture, carpets, curtains, light fittings, cutlery, glass, china, and
linen—in harmony. He and his house played a major role in the 1901 exhibition of the
artists’ colony, titled Ein Dokument Deuts cher Kunst (A Document of German Art). In his first year in the colony, he
wrote and published a long essay on the theater, Fes te des Lebens und der Kunst, and designed a round, highly
centralized Festival Theatre, the plans of which were published but never realized.
In 1902 Behrens’s first printing type, Behrens-Schrift, was published. He was to
design a number of typefaces, including a special face for the AEG that is still used today
for that company’s logo, and, with Anna Simons, the inscription on the portico of the
Reichstag in Berlin, Dem Deuts chen Volke (1909).
Of importance to his growing reputation was his contribution to the First International
Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts in Turin in 1902. He was responsible for the
Hamburger Vorhalle, a powerfully modeled, cryptlike, top-lit hall. It may be considered
the most Art Nouveau of Behrens’s architectural works, and the strongest expression of
his admiration for Frederich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Following this, his architecture
became more rectilinear and geometric, and indeed it remained so for the rest of his
career.
In 1903 Behrens moved to Düsseldorf, where he had been appointed director of the
School of Arts and Crafts. In that year, he traveled in England and Scotland, visiting
houses by Edwin Lutyens and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. A striking demonstration of
Behrens’s new, coolly geometrical style was seen in the garden layout and pavilion that
he designed for the Düsseldorf Gartenbau und Kunstausstellung (Garden Design and
Pavilion) of 1904. In harmony with the restaurant pavilion (which Behrens furnished with
Mackintosh-like ladder-backed chairs) were rectangular white latticework pergolas,
creating what was described as “habitable nature, a living room in the open air” (Osborn).
A lasting influence on Behrens’s design procedure came from the proportional grids,
based on the square and the circle evolved by the Dutch architect J.L.M.Lauweriks, who
joined Behrens’s staff in that year. Behrens spent the summer of that same year studying
the antiquities of Rome and Pompeii.
Between 1904–06, Behrens designed a number of buildings that directly
fuse the elements of simple geometry with classically derived decoration.
For example, the complex of buildings for the Northwest German Art
Exhibition of 1905 was symmetrically grouped on a broad rectangular
space to form an ensemble of cubes, pyramids, domes, and triangles. The stark white buildings with their bold
geometric surface patterns suppressed any expression of their material or constructional
elements. His domed, octagonal exhibition pavilion in Dresden for the Delmenhorster
Linoleumfabrik of 1906, as well as the range of linoleum patterns exhibited in it, led to
Behrens’s recognition as an artist who was gifted for and suited to working with modern
industry.
Behrens’s friendship with the patron Karl Ernst Osthaus of Hagen led to a number of
commissions in the city, as well as to his famous Crematorium nearby at Delstern (1906–
07). They included a lecture theater for the Folkwang Museum (1905), a shop for the firm
of Josef Klein (1905–07), a large octagonal Protestant church that was never built (1906–
07), and an important group of houses on an estate at Eppenhausen, for which Osthaus
was the developer.
The garden suburb at Eppenhausen was divided by Osthaus into three zones, and he
asked Behrens, Lauweriks, and the Belgian Henri van de Velde to prepare related groups
of houses for each area. Behrens’s were built between 1909 and 1912, following a
dramatic new phase in his life as artistic adviser to the AEG. He moved to Berlin in 1907,
and his three houses (the Cuno, Schroeder, and Goedecke houses) were detailed and supervised
by Walter Gropius. Gropius was the closest to him of the team of assistants he
had engaged to join his Berlin studio, to work on his now immensely expanded practice.
The most impressive of the houses remains the Cuno house (1909–10). Rectangular in
plan, it resembles a Palladian villa, with a nearly symmetrical disposition of the rooms on
the ground floor. The living room on the garden side, centrally placed between the
identically scaled dining room and the ladies’ drawing room, opens through a large threelight
French window onto a generous terrace. The most striking feature of the main, street
facade is the curved central tower, recessed into the plane of the front walls, which rises
the full height of the elevation and contains a spiral staircase. This, with its five plain
narrow windows between slender piers, is flanked by a rusticated ground-floor story in
local stone, above which plain, smoothly rendered wall surfaces are broken only by three
square bedroom windows on either side in the upper story. The web of horizontal and
vertical tensions of the design is given an asymmetrical rhythm by the stone wall of one
of the balconies (which flank the house on either side), wrapping around to the front as a
thick buttresslike wall. Horizontal emphasis is given by the low-pitched roof set behind a
stepped-back parapet, a thin emphatic cornice, and a similar stringcourse halfway up the
facade.
The most remarkable development in Behrens’s career was his appointment in 1907 to
the AEG. He redesigned the firm’s range of arc lamps, kettles, coffee pots, fans, clocks,
radiators, and motors, bringing enormous commercial success to the firm. He designed a
vast range of brochures, posters, and catalogs and devised typefaces as well as the logo of
the company. More important, he became responsible for the firm’s industrial
architecture. In 1910 the best known of his factory buildings, the Turbine Hall at Moabit,
was completed. The largest steel hall in Berlin of its time, this great building is formed of
22 girder frames exposed along one side; the main facade has a huge steel-framed
window under a curved segmental concrete gable; the profile is made up of six straight
facets. This rests on massive-looking concrete piers, grooved horizontally, which affect
the corners on either side. Its peculiar genius lies in the expressive force of steel and glass
used on a large scale, without historical decorations of any kind.
Between 1908 and 1914, a range of giant factory buildings on the Humbolthain in
Berlin were designed by Behrens and his team, which included Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe and, for a brief period, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) alongside
Gropius. The most significant of these steel-framed buildings were the High Tension
Materials Factory (1910), a powerful, expressive multistory complex with echoes of
classical form in its triangular pediments and pilasterlike columns on its principal facade,
and the Small Motors Factory (1910), with its vast, stoa-like range of 20-meter-high brick
piers facing Voltastrasse. Also, there is the Assembly Hall (for large machines, 1912)
flanking Hussitenstrasse, with its restrained grid of repeated horizontal and vertical
elements framing the large rectangular windows.
A major state commission of the period was the German Embassy, St. Petersburg
(1911–12), which owed inspiration to Roman palazzi of the 16th century and to Schinkel’s
Entries A–F 231
Altes Museum. An astonishing number of other large projects that were completed
included the head office of the Mannesmann Tube Company in Düsseldorf (1911–12), a
pioneering exercise in modular planning and construction; the Continental Rubber
Company Factory in Hannover (1911–12); the Frankfurt Gasworks Complex (1911–12);
and the Festival Hall for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne.
Behrens’s contract with the AEG was terminated in 1914. After the war, he published,
with Heinrich de Fries, Von spars amen Bauen (1918; On Economical Building), which advocated low-cost
housing schemes to be built of reinforced concrete, incorporating the latest facilities and
communal social services using standardized units to create varied types of
accommodation with built-in storage cupboards to maximize the space.
Following a period of brick expressionism—used, for example, for the head offices of
the Hoechst Dyeworks for IG Farben and the Dombauhütte (Cathedral Masons’ Lodge)
exhibition building in Munich (1922)—Behrens’s style changed yet again. This time the
change led to mainstream International Modern, a style for which his own earlier work
had been formative. Other projects included blocks of flats (1924–28) for the authorities
in Vienna, where he lived following his appointment as professor of the Master School
for Architecture, the small house New Ways in Northampton, England (1923–25), his
terrace block on the Weissenhof estate in Stuttgart (1926–27), his house for Dr. Lewin,
Berlin (1929–30), and the superb villa for Clara Gans in the Taunus Mountains (1931).
All of these buildings had flat roofs over plain, cubic forms with a strong horizontal
emphasis. His Ring der Frauen pavilion for the 1931 Berlin Building Exhibition was a delightful,
prototypical women’s clubhouse comprising several low intersecting cylindrical
elements.
During the Third Reich, despite being attacked as a Bolshevist, the elderly and sick
Behrens was invited to design a new AEG headquarters (1937–39) for the North-South
Axis of Berlin being planned by Albert Speer. It was never constructed.