AEG Turbine Factory

About this place

Peter Behrens's Turbine Hall, completed in 1909 for AEG in Berlin's Moabit district, is one of the defining buildings of early industrial modernism — and one of the first works to elevate a factory to the status of architecture. The building's principal elevation on Huttenstraße presents a massive exposed steel portal frame, its diagonal corner piers rising without ornament, the glass curtain between them filling the façade from near-ground to near-roof. Behrens stripped the building of historicist decoration but retained monumental presence: the proportions are classical, the intention unmistakably civic. As head of design at AEG from 1907, Behrens was responsible not just for architecture but for the company's entire visual identity — products, graphics, typefaces. The Turbine Hall was the physical expression of a total design philosophy: the idea that industry could carry aesthetic ambition. Three of the most influential architects of the 20th century — Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius — worked in Behrens's office during the years the building was designed, absorbing its lessons firsthand. The hall is still in use as an industrial workshop. It is listed as a protected monument and recognised internationally as a landmark of industrial heritage and the roots of proto-modernist thought.