Aeg Turbine Factory: Peter Behrens

Abstract

AbstractThe AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin, designed by the architect Peter Behrens (1868–1940) in collaboration with the building engineer Karl Bernhard (1859–1937), represents a milestone in the development of modern industrial architecture. Built in just a few months in 1909 in glass, iron, and concrete as an enormous modern industrial production space – the largest iron construction in Berlin at the time, with an enclosed volume of around 150,000 cubic meters uninterrupted by internal supports – today, more than a hundred years later, it still fulfills its original function, the assembly of large industrial turbines. The Turbine Factory has long been hailed as representing the integration of industrial building types and modern construction methods and materials into the tradition of architecture, and an artistic elevation of the modern workplace and the world of industry into the realm of culture. The Turbine Factory constitutes an attempt at reconciling the modern disciplines of architecture and engineering – or, as Behrens would put it, creating a new unity between art and technology – and one of its historical achievements is that it marks a new beginning in artists’ and architects’ engagement with the sites and products of modern industry in the early twentieth century.