Designed by Peter Behrens and Karl Bernhard; completed 1910 Berlin, Germany Largely misunderstood by the historians of the Modern movement who celebrated it as the first major work of frank industrial architecture endowed with exceptional “functional directness,” the AEG Turbine Factory—designed by Peter Behrens and Karl Bernhard and completed 1910—remains the most admired and most influential of Behrens’s works. Designed between 1908 and 1909 for the Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesesells (AEG)— a German electrical concern founded by Emil Rathenau in 1883—the factory was placed strategically at the southern edge of the factory complex along Huttenstrasse and Berlichingenstrasse, facing Berlin and the world as a show front of the prosperous industrial magnate. Complying with such expectations and following his own ideological stance, Behrens built a magnificent iron and glass hybrid of two eminently classical temple traditions—the Greek and the Egyptian—meant to glorify industrial might. I...