Somewhat similar to Behrens’s work of this period in its evident derivation from German Romantic Classicism, but more delicate in scale, was the work of Heinrich Tessenow (1876-1950), notably his Festival Theatre of 1910-13 and the other buildings he designed and erected for the Art Colony at Hellerau near Dresden. But such German work, of which a great deal was produced in the decade before the First World War, corresponds rather closely, despite the frequent stylization of detail and the serious concern with geometrical clarity in composition, to the Neo-Georgian of England and America in the early twentieth century, and also to much parallel work in the Scandinavian countries that is usually of rather higher quality (see Chapter [24]).

Moreover, those Frenchmen who castigated the Théâtre des Champs Élysées as ‘Boche’ during the First World War because of the presumption that it was designed by Van de Velde, born a Belgian but head of a German art school, were not altogether wrong. In its scraped Classicism and rigidly geometrical ordonnance Perret’s façade was not at all remote from one of the most characteristic German modes of the years just before 1914. Perret’s industrial work was, of course, much more significant for the future.

So also with Behrens it was the challenge that his position as architect of the A.E.G. brought of working in the industrial field that made him briefly a rival of Wright, and even more particularly of Perret, as a major architectural innovator. Behrens’s first work for the A.E.G., the Turbine Factory at the corner of the Hussitenstrasse and the Berlichingenstrasse in Moabit, an industrial suburb of Berlin, was erected in 1909 immediately upon his appointment as successor to Messel. This broke new ground in several ways. It was built partly of poured concrete, partly of exposed steel, with both materials very directly expressed (Plate [149A]). The side wall of glass and steel more than rivals in its openness those of the department stores designed by Art Nouveau architects (Plates 131B and 133). But Behrens’s façade, in contradistinction to theirs, has no applied ornament whatsoever. Moreover, he ordered the whole composition as carefully as Schinkel might have done if either large factories or metal-and-glass construction had come within his purview.

The end façade of the Turbine Factory is slightly less frank in design. The concrete corners on either side of the central window-wall of metal and glass are battered and striated horizontally as if to suggest rusticated masonry. The gable of the multi-faceted roof is brought forward to shelter the window-wall; this projects slightly in front of the concrete corners, almost like a Shavian bay-window raised to industrial scale. The treatment of the window-bands of the lower concrete block to the left resembles that of Schinkel’s articulated walls on the Berlin Schauspielhaus, but with all the Greek mouldings omitted. Thus the functional elements of a factory executed throughout in new materials were here for the first time in Germany architectonically ordered with no dependence on decoration of any sort. Wright had done much the same four years earlier in his little-known E.-Z. Polish Factory in Chicago, but the scale of that is modest and its walls are not extensively fenestrated. Perret had come closer to it in his Garage Ponthieu in Paris, also built in 1905. There can be little question, however, that Behrens’s is the finest building of the three.

In two more factories built in 1910 for the A.E.G., both much larger but neither of them quite so striking, Behrens broadened his range as an industrial architect. The High Tension Factory in the Humboldthain is of brick, not concrete or steel. Except for a few minor elements somewhat suggesting pedimented temple-fronts translated into an industrial vocabulary, he handled the vast façades here with the same directness as the side elevation of metal and glass at the Turbine Factory. The Small Motors Factory in the Voltastrasse is similar but much finer (Plate [148A]). There the brick piers have rounded corners and rise unbroken almost the full height of the building. The effect is somewhat like that portion of Messel’s Wertheim Store which was built in the late nineties, but the scale is larger, and there is none of Messel’s rich, half-traditional, half-Art-Nouveau detailing. Instead, the careful proportioning and the suave but extremely straightforward treatment of the structural elements again suggests Schinkel’s sort of ‘rationalism’ yet succeeds in doing so, as at the earlier Turbine Factory, with almost no reminiscence of actual Romantic Classical forms.

Thanks to the widening range of responsibility that German industry was now ready to give architects, Behrens not only built these big factories for the A.E.G. and also redecorated their retail shops all over Berlin, but he was soon asked in addition to provide some blocks of flats for the company’s workmen at Hennigsdorf outside Berlin. This was a social challenge which neither Wright nor Perret had to meet. (In fact, however, Wright did in 1904 design terrace-houses that were never executed for Larkin Company workers in Buffalo; while in France low-cost housing had a very important place in Garnier’s projects for a ‘Cité Industrielle’.) Henceforth, such housing would be a major preoccupation of most modern architects. This is true not only in Germany but all over the western world, and especially in Holland and Scandinavia. The origins of low-cost housing go back to the 1840s in England when Henry Roberts, whose Fishmongers’ Hall in London has been mentioned, became the first architect to specialize in this field. But the early history of housing[[423]] is of more sociological than architectural interest. Moreover, what the nineteenth century esteemed to be ‘model’ low-cost dwellings have too often had to be demolished as ‘sub-standard’ in the twentieth. Even the interest and activities of present-day architects may not spare the twentieth century the shame of building again as a public service what posterity will consider slums.

Various small A.E.G. factories for making porcelain, lacquer, and other specialized products were also erected by Behrens in 1910 and 1911, none of particular interest. In 1911-12, however, there followed the Large Machine Assembly Hall at the corner of the Voltastrasse and the Hussitenstrasse near the Small Motors Factory. This rivals in quality the Turbine Factory of 1909. Once more a great rectangular volume is covered with a multi-faceted steel-framed roof, the structure below being in this instance also of steel with no use of concrete. The metal frame is largely filled with glass, but brick was introduced at the base and on the ends. The scale of this unit is less monumental than that of the Turbine Factory, though the size is much greater. The general effect, particularly that of the interior with its travelling cranes, is at once light and dramatic. A big A.E.G. plant was also built by Behrens at Riga in Russia in 1913.

Three large non-industrial commissions of 1911-12 show how this work for the A.E.G. affected Behrens’s approach to design. Although it is built of stone not brick, the German Embassy (Plate [27A]) opposite Monferran’s St Isaac’s Cathedral in Petersburg is, at first sight, deceptively like the Small Motors Factory. Actually, the façade has a range of engaged Doric columns, but by their tall slim proportions and their lack of entasis these were, so to say, ‘industrially’ stylized. The great scale, the absolute regularity, and a certain coldness surely derived in part from the factories of the previous two years; but these also recall Romantic Classical monuments of Alexander I’s time in Petersburg.

Behrens’s enormous office building for the Mannesmann Steel Works on the Rhine at Düsseldorf was less successful, as was also that for the Continental Rubber Company in Hanover. The latter was designed in 1911 and begun in 1913, but not completed until after the First World War, in 1920; it was destroyed in the Second World War. The heavily reiterative sort of scraped Classicism Behrens used for these overpowering masonry blocks lacked the subtlety of composition of the Hagen houses yet retained something of the directness of expression of the A.E.G. factories. They were not untypical, however, of much large-scale German building of the second and third decades of the century. This mode developed fairly directly out of the Berlin work of Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann, although it was usually much less specifically ‘traditional’ in its detailing and even more aggressive in scale; a not dissimilar mode returned to official favour under Hitler in the mid thirties, usually with very coarse detailing.

With these big office buildings by Behrens and others one may compare the work of this period by various other German architects who preferred less classicizing modes. Early buildings by Fritz Schumacher (1869-1947), such as his crematorium in Dresden of 1908, also illustrate the megalomaniac tendencies of the period that seem so expressive of the expansive ambitions of William II’s Second Reich. The many schools that Schumacher built in Hamburg just before the First World War are simpler, although still rather heavily scaled, and more comparable in quality to Behrens’s work. One in particular, built in 1914 in the Ahrensburgerstrasse, almost echoes the elongated colonnade of Behrens’s Petersburg Embassy, but the ‘columns’ are plain piers executed in dark red brick[[424]] and strung along a front that is concave not flat. The bath-house at Eppenhausen, also of 1914, is very like the schools; while in the Kunstgewerbe Haus of the previous year on the Holstenwall in Hamburg a similar mode was employed for what is, in effect, a large office building. This seems to have initiated a local tradition of design for commercial buildings which was maintained in the twenties with little change, not only by Schumacher but by several other Hamburg architects. Schumacher’s cemetery chapel, built as late as 1923, follows much the same line.