Peter Behrens

Peter Behrens was born 14 April 1868 in Germany and became a founding member of the German Werkbund in 1907, the same year he began his transformative work for AEG, pioneering corporate design by producing typefaces, objects, and buildings under one vision. His 1909 AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin made him a leader of the rationalist German Reform Movement through the 1910s. After the First World War he shifted to Brick Expressionism - most notably the Hoechst Administration Building outside Frankfurt - and by the mid-1920s moved toward New Objectivity. From 1922 to 1936 he headed the architecture school at Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, designing across Germany, Russia, England, and Europe. Three men who would define modernism - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius - worked for him in the 1910s when they were just starting out. He died 27 February 1940.