Peter Behrens

Peter Behrens invented corporate identity as a design discipline and had Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier working in his office at the same time. He began as a painter and graphic artist in the Jugendstil manner, joined the Darmstadt artists' colony, and designed his own house there in 1901 down to the cutlery and the towels. In 1907 the electrical combine AEG hired him as artistic adviser with a brief nobody had held before: the factories, the products, the packaging, the catalogues, the shops and the letterhead. He designed all of it, including a typeface, and the result is generally called the first coherent corporate identity. His AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin of 1909 treated an industrial shed as a monument, with a steel frame, huge glazed side walls and a concrete corner deliberately shaped like a temple pylon, and it is one of the buildings modern architecture is usually said to begin with. Behrens was a founder of the Deutscher Werkbund, whose argument that art should be joined to mass production runs directly into the Bauhaus. He kept working under the Nazi government, was made head of the architecture department at the Prussian Academy in 1936, and had a design for a new AEG headquarters on Speer's north-south axis approved shortly before he died. Gropius left in 1910, Mies in 1912 and Le Corbusier stayed only five months in 1910, and all three later described the office as their real education. The Turbine Factory still stands and is still in use. His work under the Nazi government is the uncomfortable part of the biography and is usually handled briefly; he was neither a party member nor a refuser, which was the commonest position and the least examined.

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