AEG Turbine Factory

Behrens’s turbine factory for the electricity company AEG looks like a temple to industry. The steel arches and the huge glass surfaces show the structure, while the concrete corners and the gable give it a monumental form. The building became a symbol of early modernism.

In 1907 AEG hired Peter Behrens as artistic consultant. He designed the company’s products, logos and buildings, and he is regarded as one of the first industrial designers. The turbine hall was built in 1909 on Huttenstraße in Moabit, for the assembly of large steam turbines. The engineer Karl Bernhard calculated the steel structure.

The hall is about 120 metres long and has a structure of three-hinged steel arches, with hinges at the foot and at the top. Between the columns on the long side are large glass surfaces that slope inwards. The gable facing the street has a polygonal form reminiscent of a temple. The corners are of concrete, but they are not load-bearing, and their horizontal bands give them a heavy look. This has been criticised as a contradiction: the building shows its structure but also pretends to be masonry.

During Behrens’s time at AEG several young architects worked in his office, among them Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. The turbine hall thus became a school for modernism. It is still used for the manufacture of turbines and is a protected monument. The building showed how industrial architecture could be given an artistic form.

• Functionalism
• Peter Behrens