1 PETER BEHRENS 1869-1940
The godfather of corporate identity and design management in the 20th century. The man who showed Braun, Bosch, BMW and a host of other leading German companies how to co-ordinate every expression of their design – from architecture and product design to
WHO: The godfather of corporate identity and design management in the 20th century. The man who showed Braun, Bosch, BMW and a host of other leading German companies how to co-ordinate every expression of their design – from architecture and product design to publicity material.
WHAT: As ‘artistic advisor’ to the industrial conglomerate AEG between 1907 and 1914, Behrens created a new kind of integrated design policy for the company, the Sony of its day.
WHERE: Berlin and later Vienna, where he was professor of architecture at the Vienna Academy. Behrens gave Berlin a lasting monument in the new AEG turbine factory in 1908, which at the time was one of the world’s largest steel constructions.
WHY: The son of a Hamburg landowner, Behrens began his professional life working in the florid turn-of-the-century style of Art Nouveau. But when he saw the cables, transformers, motors and lamps being manufactured at AEG, he decided that taking aesthetic inspiration from nature was no longer appropriate – the modern industrial corporation needed a new visual language. The functionalist design image of AEG is now regarded as a forerunner to Modernism.
ICONS: The world’s first factory arc lamp, the world’s first electric kettle, the world’s first electric hairdryer, the modern honeycomb AEG logo. Later, in the early Twenties, the expressionist Hoechst dyeworks.
INFLUENCE: Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe all worked as assistants in Behrens’ studio at AEG. Although Mies van der Rohe quit in disgust at the design of Behrens’ controversial neo-classical German Embassy in St Petersburg in 1911, there is no doubt that Behrens played a formative role in shaping Modernist thinking. Other heirs to his ideology include Dieter Rams, whose Braun brand of pure functionalism would not have been achieved without the AEG precedent. Unfortunately, Behrens also attracted the attention of Albert Speer, architect of the Third Reich.
ODDBALL: Behrens gave ammunition to his detractors by trying to ingratiate himself with the Nazis in the Thirties, while the Bauhaus masters he had trained all fled abroad. The German Embassy in Russia, greatly admired by Hitler, didn’t help matters and affected his reputation.
SOUNDBITE: ‘The idea behind it occurs again and again in the history of the 20th century’ – Wally Olins of the AEG corporate identity enterprise.
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