INDUSTRIEKULTUR
PETER BEHRENS AND THE AEG
Tilmann Buddensieg

Tilmann Buddensieg (in collaboration with Henning Rogge): INDUSTRIEKULTUR: PETER BEHRENS AND THE AEG. Cambridge: the MIT Press, 1984. First English-language edition. A fine hardcover book in a near-fine dust jacket: DJ shows a trace of wear along upper edges. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print.

10.5 x 9 hardcover book with 520 pages and 600 halftones, 31 line drawings and 53 color plates. Translated by Iain Boyd Whyte. This volume is the definitive work on Peter Behrens, the mentor of such designer/architects as Mies van der Rohe, Gropius and Le Corbusier and whose influence was felt throughout early 20th century architecture/industial design.

Most histories of 20th century design cite Peter Behrens's seminal influence on three of his former protégés - Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier - and mention the turbine factory and arc-lamp he designed for the German electric company, the AEG. Now the full story of the extraordinary collaboration between Peter Behrens and the AEG is disclosed in this extensive account of his industrial, graphic, and architectural designs. Illustrated with 600 halftones, 31 line drawings, and 53 color plates, and augmented by substantial essays, it is one of the most complete documentations of any designers contribution to industry that has been assembled in the modern period.

During the years that Behrens worked as artistic director for the AEG, he exercised complete control over the company's image. The resulting "industriekultur" was expressed in everything from factory buildings and worker housing to electric appliances and railroad cars, from graphic communications like signatge and trademarks to letterheads and mailing labels. Behrens's idea that. a company can promote its identity through a consistent design program had repercussions far beyond Germany. Many of today's corporate giants consider design an integral part of their management policies; in Behrens's time, it was still considered a bold and controversial experiment.

In addition to the vast array of visual material from the AEG's archives, the book contains essays by Tilmann Buddensieg, Henning Rogge, Fritz Neumeyer, Karin Wilhelm, Gabriele Heidecker, and Sabine Bohle on Behrens's relationship with the AEG's management, his predecessors and successors, the AEG's rise to dominance in the electric industry, and Behrens's design of exhibitions, graphics, and public utilities. There are also pieces by several of Behrens's contemporaries and a selection of Behrens's own writings appearing for the first time in English. A fully-illustrated appendix with biographical details of the AEG principals, and a comprehensive bibliography and index conclude this rich account.

Tilmann Buddensieg is Director of the Art History Program at the University of Bonn, and has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Peter Behrens (b. Hamburg, Germany 1868; d. Berlin, Germany 1940): Originally trained as a painter, Behrens eventually abandoned painting in favor of graphic and applied arts. In 1899 he was invited to the Artists' Colony at Darmstadt where he maintained a leadership position. Afterwards he worked as the Directore of the Kunstgewerkeschule in Dusseldorf. Behren's interim there stimulated a new geometric abstraction in his work.

From 1907 to 1914, Behrens worked as an artistic adviser to the AEG in Berlin. While with AEG he created the world's first corporate image. Most of his architectural designs for the AEG borrowed from industry both in terms of form and material. The Turbine Factory in Berlin-Moabit most successfully displays the industrial nature of most of his buildings.

Behren can be considered a key figure in the transition from Jugendstil to Industrial Classicism. He played a central role in the evolution of German Modernism.

And now for some historical perspectiveon the A. E. G. High Tension Factory: "The turbine hall for the AEG in Berlin-Moabit ‹on the corner of Hutten Street ‹of 1909 ...represented the culmination of his efforts to give architectural dignity to a workplace, similar to the achievement of [Frank Lloyd Wright] with the Larkin Building in Buffalo. Glass and iron took over a workshop of an industrial plant, with an enormous span (28.16 yd.; 25.6 m). Behrens achieved a plastic effect and a dynamic form of construction of the trusses, which were pulled towards the outside, as well as through the tapering iron trusses and the glass areas which were drawn towards the inside. In particular, the monumental shape of the façade with corner pylons, which could not be considered a necessity for construction, and which were built with a thin ferro-concrete shell, caused criticism among younger architects. Ludwig Hilberseimer wrote: 'Peter Behrens is led astray by the imperialistic power consciousness of the prewar years and restrained by classical influences, and he thinks to add a facade to his turbine hall of the AEG at Moabit; an otherwise terse structure....And Erich Mendelsohn criticized the building; 'He pastes over the expression of tension, which the hall creates, with the rigidity of a repeatedly broken temple tympanon....Le Corbusier, however, admired the structure as being a charged center, 'which represents the integral architectonic creations of our time‹rooms with admirable moderation and cleanness, with magnificent machines, which set solemn and impressive accents, as the center of attraction."

"By no means did Behrens try to solve industrial problems by excluding the continuity of the architectural tradition, but he was concerned about the integration of past and present, just as he had worked earlier on the conversion of the coal symbol to the diamond symbol, which showed his life as being integrated with art...."‹ from Udo Kultermann. Architecture in the 20th Century. p30 - 31.

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