Chapter 20: Peter Behrens and Other German Architects

THE pattern of architectural development in Germany in the early decades of this century was rather different from that in either France or the United States. No academy, native or foreign, no influences from the École des Beaux-Arts discouraged innovation; yet there was an early and general reaction against the whimsicality and the decorative excesses of the Art Nouveau at which most of the younger men had tried their hands before 1900. After the First World War, however, the example of Expressionism in painting and sculpture led many architects to excesses of another sort. Expressionism in architecture,[421] or something very close to it, is not restricted to Germany. The most extreme example of any consequence, and probably the earliest, is Dutch, the Scheepvaarthuis in Amsterdam of 1912-13 by van der Meij (see Chapter 21). In Germany around 1920 various architects who had earlier been predominantly ‘traditional’ in their approach were influenced by Expressionism, as well as others who were already programmatically modern; nor was that influence restricted to the modern architects of the first generation (see Chapter 22).

The boundary line between what, in retrospect, still seems definitely modern and what now seems very similar to the ‘traditional’ work of these decades in other countries is much less sharp than in America. And no German architect of their own generation had the continuously creative achievement of a Perret or a Wright to his credit. Nevertheless Peter Behrens stands out among his contemporaries because of the vigorous boldness of his industrial buildings. Moreover, the influence of his factories of around 1910 was crucial on the next generation, and several of the later leaders actually worked in his office at that relevant period. Yet all but Behrens’s finest work can be matched in the production of other German architects; while his own vitality as an innovator was rather strictly limited to a few years and to what he did for one corporate client. That client was the A.E.G. (German General Electric Company), which had already employed Messel down to his death in 1909.

Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann (1851-1932) dominated the architectural scene in Berlin, where the latter was appointed City Architect in 1896 on the strength of his vast academic Imperial Law Courts of 1886-95 in Leipzig. In the early years of the century they both developed a formal mode that was more ‘traditional’ than modern. Despite Messel’s and Hoffmann’s usual preference for conventional sixteenth- or eighteenth-century models, Behrens was certainly not uninfluenced by their mode of design, even though his more positive sources of inspiration were of a less conservative order. Yet, in so far as one can sort out the different architectural camps in Germany in these years, Behrens must be considered well to the artistic ‘left’ of Messel and Hoffmann.

Germany was certainly very receptive to new ideas in decoration when Behrens’s architectural career began at the turn of the century—receptive rather than creative. There were other Germans who handled the Art Nouveau with considerable originality besides August Endell, notably Bernard Pankok (b. 1872) and Richard Riemerschmid (1868-1957); but two foreigners, neither of them very prolific builders, seem to have been the most influential figures on the German architectural scene at the opening of the new century. The Belgian Van de Velde had moved from Paris to Berlin in 1899; the Austrian Olbrich was called to Darmstadt by the Grand Duke in the same year. Olbrich stayed at Darmstadt until his early death in 1908; Van de Velde, however, left Berlin in 1902 when he was invited to Weimar to head the School of Arts and Crafts there which later became the Bauhaus. Van de Velde’s finest Art Nouveau furniture dates from his Berlin years around 1900. As late as 1906,[422] the Central Hall which he designed in the Dresden Exhibition showed him still a competent if rather heavy-handed decorator in the Art Nouveau tradition.

Van de Velde’s remodelling of the Folkwang Museum at Hagen of 1900-2, quite Art Nouveau in its details, his Esche house at Chemnitz of 1903, and his Leuring house at Scheveningen in Holland of the next year, both very massive and heavily mansarded though unornamented externally like his own house of 1895-6 at Uccle, hardly require particular mention. However, for the school that he headed in Weimar he completed in 1906 a building even more devoid of Art Nouveau elements and notably straightforward in character. The plain white stucco walls below his usual heavy mansards were very frankly fenestrated with ranges of wide studio windows, perhaps in emulation of Mackintosh’s Glasgow Art School. Indeed, the general effect is even simpler and more rectilinear than that of its possible Scottish prototype. The problem of his responsibility or lack of responsibility for the design of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in Paris of 1911-13 has already been discussed (see Chapter 17).

Van de Velde continued to build occasionally throughout all his long life—some portions of his Kröller-Müller Museum near Otterlo in Holland were only completed in 1953—but his last pre-war work was the theatre that he designed and executed in 1913-14 for the Werkbund Exhibition at Cologne. Some trace of the massively plastic quality of his Dresden hall of 1906—so different from the delicacy and grace of the Art Nouveau in its best period—remained in the curved walls and roof of this edifice, but the whole effect was lighter and plainer, more abstract one might almost say.

The resemblance of Olbrich’s Ernst Ludwig Haus of 1901 at the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony to Mackintosh’s Art School has already been noted (see