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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.

In accepting the challenge of designing his first industrial building, Behrens’s concern was not to recast all of architecture in terms of industry and the machine, as was most often the case with the next generation of modern architects. Rather, “his concern was…levating so dominant a societal force as the factory to the level of established cultural standard” (see Anderson, 1977).

As an adept of the Austrian art historian and critic Alois Riegel’s theory of Kunstwollen (literally, “artistic will” or the evolutionary force of style) and of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s aesthetic historicism, exemplified in the concept of the Zeitgeist, Behrens applied in the design of the Turbine Factory the principles that he had evolved as the leader of the Darmstadt artists’ colony after 1901. In direct opposition to Gottfried Semper’s “materialism,” central to Behrens’s approach was belief in the force of the artist, and art, to transform brute everyday life into a dignified existence. Akin to the carbon transformed under extreme conditions into a praised diamond, everyday life—and in this case raw industry, the factory, and the machine—could be transformed under the artist’s  into an entity of high culture. Such an ideological position, applied to industry, spread into a number of aesthetic and symbolic themes clearly reflected in the Turbine Factory. Far from depending on primary concerns for material, technical, and functional purposes, the factory was, in Behrens’s mind, the result of a specific concretization of selected industrial features, filtered through the artist’s transcendental will to form. The result was a vast crystal symbolizing the victory of art over the banality of life in an emerging machine society. If the industrial fact at hand could not be ignored, it was not the role of the artist to succumb to it helplessly, either. It is largely because of this position that Behrens’s first industrial building was unprecedented in industrial architecture and design.

In aesthetic terms, the central conflict that Behrens faced in the design of the Turbine Factory was the tectonic character of the ferro-vitreous wide span offered by his engineer, Karl Bernhard, as the necessary solution for mastering the vastness of the structure and Behrens’s adherence to the concept of Stereotomie since his 1905 pavilions at the Oldenburg Northwest German Art Exhibition. The challenge was, therefore, to find a solution that would be flexible enough to accommodate the dictates of a particular technology—including the use of given industrial materials—while preserving architecture as the eminent symbol of established cultural values of a modern capitalist state. The culmination of this synthetic process was expressed in the factory’s triumphal templelike facade with its crystalline central window of staggering dimensions that only advanced technology could have brought about.

With his limited knowledge of any kind of building technology, Behrens had to rely on the support of an engineer for such a vast and technically complex building. The shifting priorities between ideology and technology in the conception of the building necessarily resulted in a series of ambiguities and concealments that Behrens provoked rather than avoided in a strained collaboration with Bernhard.

The structural makeup of the factory consists of an asymmetrical three-hinged arch reinforced by a transversal tie-rod. The longer half of the arch springs vertically up to the second hinge and then breaks in three facets before reaching the third hinge at the apex of the arch. In properly structural terms, there was no reason for breaking the second arm into segments. The decision was a willful intervention in the engineer’s work by Behrens the artist. Historically, a variety of reasons have been advanced as an explanation for such a move. Whereas Kenneth Frampton, for example, refers to a rather improbable desire to create the shape of a farmer’s barn with its typical polygonal gable, Reyner Banham offers a technological explanation: the need for clearance for the huge internal traveling crane—even though the section shows that the tying rods forced the crane to run much lower.

The chiseled gable was, in fact, the result of two specific exigencies of Behrens’s Kunstwollen: the urge for enforced Stereotomie and the evocation of Zeichen (sign), the crystalline symbol of life as art. Indeed, the comparison between Behrens’s earlier representation of the priestess of Darmstadt carrying the redemptive crystal high above her head, as well as the majestic front of the temple-factory, reinforces the idea of a crystalshaped gable springing high above the ground in delicate balance over the equally crystalline abstracted robe of a priestess.

Furthermore, using the given technology for more ambitious aims, Behrens concealed the fact that the actual structural system of the factory was made up of a series of hinged arches by capping the building with a voluminous cornice cutting the arch at the top of its vertical member. In so doing, Behrens created the visual impression of a trabeated system in which the vertical members of the arches represented so many columns of a classical temple. By the same token, the somewhat inwardly inclined glazed surfaces between the structural members of the side elevation, along with the blown-up roofline and the massive concrete nonbearing “corner stones” wrapping around a streamlined trapezoidal silhouette, created a convincing case of a perfectly “stereotomic” volume inflated with space. Thus undermining the iron framing, Behrens prevented the construction from dematerializing into a dispersed tectonic grid—as would have been the case with the Dutert-Contamin Gallerie des Machines—and clearly subverted any engineering directness. The formulation of a symbolic structure, however, did not preclude Behrens from addressing forcefully the nature and purpose of the building.

Still remaining in the realm of powerful symbolism, Behrens allowed the function of the building to express itself allegorically not only through the exclusive use of industrial materials on a large scale but also by evoking forcefully the dominant societal role of the machine in the most memorable details of the building, such as the giant base hinges of the arches set on high concrete pedestals. As has been noted, what makes the significance and the importance of the AEG Turbine Factory, aside from actual achievement, “is that Behrens understood that the established cultural standards must be transformed in the process of assimilating modern industry.”