Peter Behrens was born in Hamburg in 1868 to a Protestant landowning family. Orphaned at fourteen, he trained as a painter at Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf before joining the Munich Secession in 1893. He co-founded the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony in 1899, where he designed and built his own house — his first work of architecture, executed without formal training.
In 1907 he was appointed artistic adviser to AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft), the Berlin electrical conglomerate. The brief was unprecedented: take responsibility for every visible aspect of the company’s output — products, factories, graphics, exhibitions. Over the next seven years he produced the first comprehensive corporate identity in design history.
That same year he was a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund, the alliance of artists, architects and industrialists that would become the institutional bridge between German craft and German modernism. His Berlin office between 1907 and 1914 employed three young architects who would shape the century: Walter Gropius (later founder of the Bauhaus), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
After World War I, Behrens taught architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (1922–1936) and the Prussian Academy of Arts (1936–1940). He continued architectural practice throughout — the Hoechst Administration Building (1924) is his major postwar work. He died in Berlin in February 1940.
