Peter Behrens's AEG Turbine Factory is the building in which an ordinary production hall — a factory — was for the first time consciously designed as an architectural statement, even at the scale of a 'temple'. Industry is treated here not as a necessity to be hidden but as an age to be celebrated.

The structure is honest: the great turbine hall is roofed by giant steel portal frames (three-hinged frames) on the side walls that taper slightly upward. These frames both carry the roof and define the building's silhouette; the wide openings between them are filled with glazing reaching almost from floor to roof. The load-bearing steel is visible from outside and is the main architectural element of the façade — structure takes the place of decoration. Behrens monumentalises this functional skeleton with heavy stone-like buttresses at the corners and a broad pediment on the front; the factory borrows the gravity of an antique temple.

The real historical weight of the AEG Turbine Factory is that it functioned like a school: three young men worked in Behrens's office in those years — Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. These three founders of 20th-century modern architecture learned here the honest and monumental use of industrial material (steel, glass). The building is thus not merely a factory but the workshop in which the modern movement was born; the first great step in taking the aesthetic of the industrial age seriously.