PETER BEHRENS AND A NEW ARCHITECTURE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

By Stanford Anderson. London: MIT Press. 1999, [pound]41.50

Although they dominated the scene a century ago, Peter Behrens and contemporaries such as Olbrich and van de Velde seem so remote to us now that it is hard to imagine, let alone empathize with, the excitement of their work when new, or to credit them with the intellectual profundity they felt they had achieved. The ground on which they fought was abolished by the next generation: the 'white architecture' depended on their advances but left them far behind, looking unforgivably old-fashioned. It showed the futility of their attempt to reinvent the styles in new combinations and through fresh analysis of principle, and it made their work a mere step towards the real revolution to come.

The career of Behrens, starting as an artist, lunching with dukes, running an art school that inspired the Bauhaus, becoming the general designer for AEG, building a house for the leading German archaeologist, and giving office space to Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier, seems n full and rich one. But the buildings are an odd mixture. They start in the realms of Jugendstil, move through various kinds of Neoclassicism, touch on Expressionism, then turn reluctantly Modernist before reverting to epic Neoclassicism under Hitler. Rather hit and miss, they include domestic works remarkably poor in terms of basic planning. One senses that Behrens never got his hands dirty and was rather an aesthete. His interest was style, image, the look of the thing, and he attempted to pin down ideals of form and proportion that finally remained elusive. His move into architecture intended an emancipation of the visual arts which, instead of being shut in a museum, were to play a full role by aestheticizing everything. When this fa iled, he expressed the melancholy of failure.

Stanford Anderson did his PhD on Behrens in 1961, which astonishingly remains the basis of the current book, just a few postscripts added. It has dated little and must be counted an important source, rich in information and analysis of the period, but it is no easy read. Partly this is because of the further reading that it seems to require rather than doing for us; partly it is for lack of the clear narrative one expects of the book after the thesis, when the author recasts a neater, sweeter picture. Perhaps he fell out of love with the subject. Perhaps, too, the thesis came too early to compete against the certainties of the 1960s, and finds a more natural place today. It is rightly revisionist in its interpretation of things like the supposedly expressed construction of the Turbine Hall. Anderson gets a long way, too, into the crucial problem of how Behrens's generation was influenced by the newly developed German art history and all the theories that accompanied it: questions of fundamental things need t o be properly understood as foundations for Modernism as a whole. One also notices, incidentally, which ideas for good or ill were handed down to Mies, Le Corbusier and Gropius. Printing and production are good, the black and white images adequate if not profuse.