Turbine factory

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AEG turbine factory

The AEG turbine factory was built in 1909, at Huttenstraße 12–16 in the Moabit district of Berlin. It is the best-known work of architect Peter Behrens. The 100 m long steel-framed building with 15 m tall glass windows on either side is considered the first attempt to introduce restrained modern design to industrial architecture. It was a bold move, and world first that would have a durable impact on architecture as a whole.

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• Peter Behrens, Turbine Factory (article) | Khan Academy

  Located in the Moabit district of Berlin, the AEG Turbine Factory was Behrens’ first factory design. The structure was to house the production of steam turbines—engines that use pressurized steam to generate electricity—a rapidly growing industry in the early-20th century Germany, as the country’s maritime power developed in rivalry with that of Britain. The essential contours of the factory—a steel-frame rectangular structure, approximately 122 meters long, 40 meters wide and 26 meters tall—were specified by AEG’s turbine fabrication director Oscar Lasche. The main assembly hall had to accommodate two large cranes, capable of lifting 100 tons and installed at such a height that the largest turbine parts could be lifted over the machines on the assembly floor. Smaller, flanking [...] As a self-taught architect, untrained in engineering, Behrens was willingly reliant on the expertise of Lasche and other talented engineers when it came to the building’s materials and structural dimensions. But as an artist, Behrens was able to give form and meaning to the factory in a way that eluded the engineers. Behrens saw the Turbine Factory as a symbol of modernism, and its attributes of speed, noise, and power. He wanted to make the interior and exterior as simple as possible, and in collaboration with the engineers chose to use fewer, but more massive girder frames than was commonly employed in such a large building. The AEG Turbine Factory was to be a temple dedicated to a new age of production. The classicism evoked in its reinforced concrete, pedimented façade was not of [...] The monumental iconic façade—at the center of which stood Behren’s hexagonal logo for the AEG—was also to become the company’s corporate face. It is here that we can best recognize how Behrens used symbolically-charged forms to create new functions. In its materiality, the concrete façade serves no structural purpose. But in its mass, it accomplishes what the elongated steel beams of the structure’s skeleton does not. The Turbine factory was not Germany’s first major iron and glass building, nor was it the country’s first industrial construction. It was unprecedented because it served as a cultural icon of modern industrial power. It expanded the realm of the architect’s work and established new guidelines for mass-production. See video transcript Bibliography

• AEG Turbine Factory by Peter Behrens

  # AEG Turbine Factory by Peter Behrens ## Channel: Architecture Enthusiast 12.8K subscribers 63 likes ### Description 2,324 views Posted: 2024-09-21 The AEG Turbine Factory, designed by Peter Behrens and completed in 1909 in Berlin, is a landmark of early modern industrial architecture. As you approach the building, its immense scale immediately draws you in. Measuring roughly 100 meters in length and 25 meters in width, the factory's vast, iron-and-glass facade rises like a giant machine, an appropriate reflection of its purpose: to produce turbines for the AEG company, a leader in the burgeoning electrical industry. [...] To stand in the AEG Turbine Factory is to experience the early 20th century’s vision of progress. It is a space where architecture celebrates the power of machines and industry, yet simultaneously raises questions about the human experience within this rapidly changing world. Behrens’ design, through its monumental form and innovative use of materials, captures both the optimism and the anxieties of the industrial age. [...] Others critiqued the building's monumental scale, which they felt dwarfed the workers who toiled within it. The imposing dimensions and stark materials were seen as symbols of the era’s alienation between laborers and the products of their work. The building, in this view, mirrored the dehumanizing effects of the industrial age, prioritizing machines over people. Despite these critiques, the AEG Turbine Factory is now recognized as a pioneering work of industrial architecture. It represented a new architectural language, one where function dictated form and the needs of industry shaped the built environment in a profound way. Today, it stands as a testament to the aspirations and contradictions of an industrial society on the threshold of modernity.

• AEG Turbine Factory Architecture Guide – Chisel & Mouse

  The Turbine Factory is a building that makes its argument completely and without compromise. Reduced to plaster form, that argument — that industrial production deserves architectural dignity — becomes if anything more legible, stripped of the contextual noise of the Berlin streetscape. View the AEG Turbine Factory architectural model ## Visiting the AEG Turbine Factory The factory is a working industrial building on the Siemens/AEG campus in Berlin-Moabit and is not open to the public as a cultural attraction. The exterior — particularly the gable end on Huttenstrasse — is visible from the street and is freely accessible for external viewing and photography. The building is located in the Wedding/Moabit area of Berlin, approximately 3km north-west of the Hauptbahnhof. [...] The AEG Turbine Factory at Huttenstrasse 12–16 in Berlin-Moabit is one of the most consequential industrial buildings ever constructed — a steel-and-glass hall completed in 1909 that did something no factory had done before: it made industrial production look like architecture. Designed by Peter Behrens (1868–1940) in his role as artistic director of the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, it was not simply a functional enclosure for manufacturing turbines. It was a manifesto. Behrens took the practical demands of a vast, column-free production space and turned them into a monumental civic statement — a building that treated the making of machines as an activity worthy of the same formal intelligence that had previously been reserved for cathedrals and government buildings. [...] ## What is the AEG Turbine Factory? The AEG Turbine Factory was built as a production hall for large electrical turbines for the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft — General Electric Company — one of the two largest industrial corporations in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. Founded in 1883 by Emil Rathenau, AEG had by 1907 become a vertically integrated industrial empire, manufacturing everything from light bulbs and electric trams to locomotives and naval turbines. Its production facilities in Berlin-Moabit occupied an enormous campus of factory buildings, workshops, and assembly halls.

• AEG Turbine Factory

  The AEG turbine factory is a turning point in architectural history: architect Peter Behrens and engineer Karl Bernhard were the first to apply stylistic

• AEG turbine factory - Wikipedia

  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Factory in Berlin designed by Peter Behrens , which was an electrical company founded by August Thyssen and the Thomson Houston Electric Company. The company's goal was to enter the booming electrical industry, and this site was dedicated to the production of electric trams. The UEG quickly encountered financial difficulties, and the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG) took over in 1904 and planned the construction of a new turbine factory, as the existing factory had become too small. [...] In 1939, Jacob Schallberger and Paul Schmidt designed an extension of the hall to the north extending it to 207m. The whole building was developed to function as a production site for turbines. It is now part of Siemens, which still operates a gas turbine plant there. This factory was actually designed with such foresight that it still serves the same purpose of producing turbines, a hundred years later. ## Significance [edit] Behrens design referenced the neo-classical, with metal strapping on the piers of the gable end either side creating a rusticated "Rustication (architecture)") appearance. David Watkin describes it as a "temple of power". Similarly, Tom Wilkinson likens it to an "up-to-date edition of the Parthenon". [...] Factory design at that time was either unpretentious steel and glass, or a "crenellated castle-cities" with a dowdy coat of historicist design, hiding the technology within. Peter Behrens created an architecture for industry that came out of hiding behind historicist facades for the first time, transformed by a new self-confidence, creating a suitably impressive and sophisticated image for the public face of the Moabit industrial site. Franz Hessel wrote, "There is no lovelier building than that monumental hall of glass and reinforced concrete: the Peter Behrens turbine factory on Huttenstrasse."