Sigfried Giedion
Sigfried Giedion (Prague, 14 April 1888 – 10 April 1968 in Zürich) (sometimes misspelled Siegfried Giedion) was a Bohemian-born Swiss historian and critic of architecture.
His ideas and books, Space, Time and Architecture, and Mechanization Takes Command, had an important conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s era.
He was the first secretary-general of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne. He has also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
He was a pupil of Heinrich Wölfflin.
Space, Time & Architecture Giedion wrote an influential standard history of modern architecture, Mechanization Takes Command established a new kind of historiography.
He married Carola Giedion-Welcker, who created a circle of vanguardist artists in Switzerland, which included architect Aldo van Eyck. His daughter Verena married the architect Paffard Keatinge-Clay.
Literary works
- Spätbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus, 1922
- Space, Time & Architecture: the growth of a new tradition, 1941 - Harvard University Press, 5th edition, 2003, ISBN 0-674-83040-7
- Nine Points on Monumentality, 1943
- Mechanization Takes Command: : a contribution to anonymous history, Oxford University Press 1948
- Walter Gropius, work and teamwork, Reinhold Pub. Co. 1954
- Architecture, You and Me: The Diary of a Development, Harvard UP 1958
- The Eternal Present, 1964
- Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, Getty Research Institute, 1995, originally published in German as Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928)
Secondary literature
- Sokratis Georgiadis (1993) Sigfried Giedion : An Intellectual Biography, Edinburgh University Press
External links
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