debauhaus1-2, Exercise 3: Behrens and AEG

Model answer:

Three ways Peter Behrens's work for AEG joined design and industry (check each):
1. Buildings. He designed AEG's factory buildings, including the turbine factory in Berlin (1909), a large glass and steel hall that treated an industrial building as architecture.
2. Products. He designed products such as electric kettles and lamps with simplified forms suited to being made in series, showing that an architect could design for production and not only for one-off commissions.
3. Identity. He worked on the company's logo, lettering and publicity so that its buildings, goods and printing looked like parts of one whole, an early example of coordinated corporate design.

Why it mattered to Gropius: Gropius is said to have worked in Behrens's office around 1907 to 1910 (check the dates). It gave him a working model of a designer shaping a whole industrial enterprise, which is close to the idea of design training that he later put at the centre of the Bauhaus: that architects and designers should understand materials, making and industry together.