Peter Behrens (14 April 1868 – 27 February 1940) was a leading German architect, graphic and industrial designer, best known for his early pioneering AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin in 1909.

Several of the leading names of European modernism worked for him when they were starting out in the 1910s, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.

[1] In 1907, Behrens and ten other people (Hermann Muthesius, Theodor Fischer, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Bruno Paul, Richard Riemerschmid, Fritz Schumacher, among others), plus twelve companies, gathered to create the German Werkbund.

In this period his growing office had many students and assistants, some who would go on become leading Modernists, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,[3] Le Corbusier, Adolf Meyer, Jean Kramer and Walter Gropius (later to become the first director of the Bauhaus).

Immediately after the AEG Turbine Hall, he designed a series of large office buildings in a bold monumental stripped classical form, part of the German Reform Architecture movement.

In 1925 he was invited by his former student Mies van der Rohe, along with many of the leading German architects working in the new style, to design a residential building in Stuttgart, in the development now known as the Weissenhof.

[5] The same year he designed a renovation of the Feller-Stern department store in central Zagreb, Croatia, transforming it from Art Nouveau to a complex almost De Stijl Modernist composition.

In 1929, Behrens, in partnership with former student Alexander Popp, was commissioned to design a new factory for the state-run Austria Tabak in Linz, which was built over a long period, due to the economic conditions, finally completed in 1935.

In 1936 Behrens left Vienna to teach architecture at the Prussian Academy of Arts (now the Akademie der Künste) in Berlin, reportedly with the specific approval of Hitler.