Peter Behrens
Peter Behrens went from painting and Jugendstil to shaping an entire company, AEG, from logo to factory. His turbine hall became a symbol of modernism, and Gropius, Mies and Le Corbusier all worked in his office.
Peter Behrens was born in 1868 in Hamburg and trained as a painter in Hamburg, Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf. He was a co-founder of the Munich Secession in 1892 and worked with woodcuts, book art and applied art in Jugendstil. In 1899 he was called to the artists’ colony in Darmstadt, where he built his own house and designed everything in it. The house was his route into architecture. He then became director of the school of applied arts in Düsseldorf.
In 1907 Behrens was hired by the electricity company AEG in Berlin as artistic consultant. He designed everything from lamps, fans and kettles to catalogues and the logo, and he designed factories, among them the turbine hall in Moabit in 1909. This has made him one of the first industrial designers. He was a co-founder of the Deutscher Werkbund in 1907, which sought to unite art and industry. He also designed the German Embassy in Saint Petersburg and the office building for Hoechst in Frankfurt, with an Expressionist brick interior.
Behrens died in Berlin in 1940. Around 1908–1911 Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier all worked in his office, and all became leaders of modernism. He is therefore regarded as one of the fathers of modernism, even though his own architecture was often monumental and classically inflected. His work for AEG is usually seen as the first example of a coherent corporate identity.