18 Facts About Peter Behrens

Peter Behrens was a leading German architect, graphic and industrial designer, best known for his early pioneering AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin in 1909.

Peter Behrens had a long career, designing objects, typefaces, and important buildings in a range of styles from the 1900s to the 1930s.

Peter Behrens was a foundation member of the German Werkbund in 1907, when he began designing for AEG, pioneered corporate design, graphic design, producing typefaces, objects, and buildings for the company.

Peter Behrens was an educator, heading the architecture school at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1922 to 1936.

Peter Behrens studied painting in his native Hamburg, as well as in Dusseldorf and Karlsruhe, from 1886 to 1889.

Peter Behrens frequented the bohemian circles and was interested in subjects related to the reform of lifestyles.

In 1899 Peter Behrens accepted the invitation of the Grand Duke Ernst-Ludwig of Hesse to be the second member of his recently inaugurated Darmstadt Artists' Colony, where Peter Behrens built his own Jugendstil style house in 1901, and fully conceived everything, from furniture to towels, paintings, pottery, etc.

In 1903, Peter Behrens was named director of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dusseldorf, where he implemented successful reforms, developing new ways of teaching design.

Peter Behrens designed a series of factory buildings for them at their two Berlin factory sites, most famously the 1909 AEG Turbine Factory, at the Moabit site, considered an early example of Modernism.

Peter Behrens then went on to design four new buildings at the Humboldthain site, which showed that he was as much interested in massive, bold, classical and picturesque effects depending on the context, as expressing modernity.

Since Peter Behrens was a consultant rather than an employee of AEG, he was free to work on projects, and developed a highly successful architectural practice.

In 1926, Peter Behrens was commissioned by the Englishman Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke to design a family home in Northampton, UK.

Peter Behrens's contribution was a set of apartments in stacked cubic volumes, allowing many apartments to open to large terraces.

Peter Behrens's 1931 hillside villa for the Clara Gans, daughter of Frankfurt industrialist Adolf Gans, was a similarly complex interplay of rectangular volumes, clad in stone, a fine example of New Objectivity.

In 1929, Peter Behrens was invited to the competition for the design of buildings around a proposed radical redesign of Alexanderplatz in Berlin, and though he came second, his designs for the buildings on the south west side of the new square was preferred by the subsequent developer, and the Alexanderhaus and the Berolinahaus were built by 1932.

The main building has a very long completely horizontal slightly curved facade, Peter Behrens' most striking design in the style of New Objectivity.

In 1936 Peter Behrens left Vienna to teach architecture at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, reportedly with the specific approval of Hitler.

Peter Behrens died in the Hotel Bristol in Berlin on 27 February 1940, while seeking refuge there from his country estate.