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Friday 25 December 2015

Honey, I Froze Le Corbusier


It has to be the revelation of the year century. On a scale to be rivalled by Dan Brown novels set in St. Peter's Basilica. For around 100 years ago, a man called Peter Behrens was hired by a German engineering company to the position of 'Articstic Consultant'. Alongside the logotype and corporate identity, Behrens designed the firm's iconic turbine factory in Berlin, and also a significant number of it's products. Peter Behrens is considered to be the world's first industrial designer. The savvy German engineering company that hired him was AEG.

So that puts AEG at the very top of the design family tree. Neat. They make well engineered home appliances [Ultraloft's new shiny fridge freezer, pictured] and consumer electronics. Having something with the AEG moniker around the Ultraloft gives me a warm comfortable feeling of buying in to that design pedigree. That was until, I did a little more research and fell backwards out of my [EA105] chair.

You may want to anchor yourself to the floor... It wasn't just Behrens, father of industrial design that worked for AEG. Miles van der Rohe, creator of the iconic Barcelona chair worked for Behrens at AEG. Walter Gropius too, later to become the first director of the Bauhaus worked for AEG. And the revelation that sent me plummeting, sternforemost to the floor, is that, the being conceived as the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, principal object of faith and worship at Design Trawler, Le Corbusier, worked alongside Behrens, Gropius, and Mies at AEG.

The three letters AEG aren't just a nod toward innovative German engineering. They represent a perfect storm; a fantasy dream team of everything design, and architecture, and efficiency should be. And is.
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