ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

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...

Architect, United States David Adler, a proponent of Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts and its classical teachings of symmetry, balance, and superb proportions and an all-inclusive plan whereby a building relates to its surroundings, was one of America’s most important great-house Entries A–F 25 architects. Born to Isaac David, a prosperous second-generation wholesale clothier, and his wife, Theresa Hyman, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Adler was educated at the Lawrenceville School and Princeton University. After graduating from Princeton in 1904, Adler moved to Europe, where he traveled extensively and studied architecture at the Polytechnikum (1904–06) in Munich and at the École des Beaux-Arts (1908–11), whose curriculum included lessons in structural and technical applications. However, because Adler was interested exclusively in design, he returned to the United States without mastering these key assignments, bringing with him a collection of 500 picture postcards that documented the importa...