Industrial Architecture: AEG and Fagus Factories

The problems of turning industrial buildings into architecture are illustrated in two German factories built by two different architects just before the First World War. At first the gigantic monumentalism of Behrens' AEG turbine factory seems very different from the delicate glass envelope of Gropius's Fagus shoe-last factory; but we find that Gropius was in fact indebted to Behrens in many ways, although his handling of glass in the façades was all his own, and revolutionary. Both men were interested in the ideas of KF Schinkel, an early nineteenth-century Neo-classical architect, and we can trace a continuity of classical architectural ideas through the still recognizable columns and pediments of Behrens to the less recognizable but still essentially classical forms of the Fagus factory.

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