The Architectural Imagination [Part-2]

The development of technologies that allow the production of large sheets of glass and the materials with tensile strength like steel enormously changed the way the buildings were made shifting the architecture from heavy compressive forces in masonry to lightweight and thin structures.

Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft

In some ways, this advent of new materials resulted in architecture beginning around the end of the 19th century, and intensifying in the 20th century began to be used for commercial purposes.

One of the seminal examples of this movement is the General Electric Company, in Germany whose headquarters were on a prominent Urban site in Berlin.

Factories at this period were considered under perfunctory building type and the materials like steel and glass were basically used such that building could span large distances.

Peter Behrens was clear about his ambition to raise the factory architecture to the status of serious, profound architecture.

Bird's eye view

Interior view

In order to conceptualize this representational role that this new architecture to play, Behrens devised an architectural theory.

It has to do with the way architecture appears in history as a representation of a sort of cultural ethos, and that representational role of architecture has to change through time as history, itself moves forward.

It was clear from his work that industrial capitalism was a new authority. The architectural paradigm that was adequate to this new ethos was the factory.