Space, Time, and Architecture by Sigfried Giedion
"Space, Time, and Architecture," written by Sigfried Giedion, is a seminal work in architectural history that emerged from a series of lectures Giedion delivered at Harvard University in the late 1930s. The book, originally published in German in 1941, reflects Giedion's engagement with modern architecture and cultural criticism, emphasizing the interconnectedness of space, time, and the built environment. It is characterized by a conversational style that prioritizes the flow of ideas over rigid academic formality, making it accessible to a broad audience.
Giedion's exploration includes significant architectural works, such as the Eiffel Tower and Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie, providing a documentary account that is deeply intuitive and illustrative. He advocates for the mission of artists to explore the unconscious and emphasizes the need for cultural unity and environmental humanization. While his aesthetic judgments are supported by selected historical examples, Giedion's approach encourages further inquiry rather than offering dogmatic conclusions. His reflections resonate with psychological themes, notably those of Carl Gustav Jung, particularly regarding the interplay between thought and emotion in society. Overall, "Space, Time, and Architecture" remains an influential text, serving as a valuable introduction to modern architectural discourse.
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Space, Time, and Architecture by Sigfried Giedion
First published: 1941
Type of work: Cultural criticism
Form and Content
In the late 1930’s, Sigfried Giedion, a Swiss art historian, traveled from Europe to the United States to teach at Harvard University, where he was invited to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures for the academic year 1938-1939. These lectures, with the seminars he gave during the same period, formed the basis for the text of the first edition of Space, Time, and Architecture (1941). Both the lectures and the text of the book were originally prepared in German, Giedion’s native language and the one in which he had earlier published two books of architectural history.
Giedion states in the foreword to the first edition of Space, Time, and Architecture that it “was written in stimulating association with young Americans,” and the book has the ambience of the university lecture hall, where the flow of ideas is often more important than the formality or completeness of their presentation. Although Giedion takes up clearly defined positions on many issues of art, architecture, and cultural analysis, his approach to his material is more illustrative than dogmatic; the book’s many editions and reprintings are evidence both of the documentary value of the author’s well-illustrated text and of the continuing interest of Giedion’s insights into modern architecture.
Critical Context
In its final pages, Giedion returns to many of the passionate themes with which he began Space, Time, and Architecture—the mission of the artist to “open up new spheres of the unconscious,” the need for a “unity of culture,” and the humanization of the environment. To the degree that he has established a firm basis for his aesthetic judgments about particular buildings and environments, Giedion successfully renews these generalizations, but only in their broad sense. The descriptive and historical elements of his text, taken together with the book’s illustrations, seem well integrated on a deeply intuitive level, but they are more a safety net for his weightier concepts than a demonstration of them. Many of Giedion’s conceptions of the individual in society are very reminiscent of those of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, particularly with regard to the consequences of the “split” between thinking and feeling. Such ideas require the scope of investigation that Jung gave them and that Giedion, as an architectural historian, could not, but Giedion’s adaptation of them is both sincere and constructive.
Giedion shows little evidence of having wished to distill or refine the arguments in Space, Time, and Architecture, and he clearly wishes his affectionate advocacy for his subject to be the standard by which the book is judged. The success of his advocacy is shown by the fact that the book can continue to serve as a kind of partisan introduction to architecture since the Renaissance. It is highly selective in the examples used to support its points of view, but this fact is readily apparent, and the book is unlikely to stand in the way of further investigations; in any case, it has been a touchstone for most later architectural historians, including those whose views diverge markedly from the author’s. A large part of Space, Time, and Architecture consists of documentation of buildings that belong in any history of modern architecture, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Crystal Palace (erected in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851), and the Villa Savoie of Le Corbusier, constructed between 1928 and 1930.
The epigrammatic and oracular elements in the author’s presentation and the occasional disjunctive or repetitive passage seem insignificant in relation to the whole of Space, Time, and Architecture; Giedion’s urgency and enthusiasm outdistance his rhetorical quirks and make the book more readable than the vast majority of studies in art and art history.
Bibliography
Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 1960.
Blake, Peter. The Master Builders, 1960.
Conant, Kenneth John. Review in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. I (1941), pp. 126-129.
Haskell, Douglas. Review in The Nation. CLII (August 16, 1941), p. 145.
Jencks, Charles. Modern Movements in Architecture, 1973.
Pevsner, Nikolaus. Review in Burlington Magazine. LXXXII (January, 1943), pp. 25-26.
Watkin, David. Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement, 1977.
Wolfe, Tom. From Bauhaus to Our House, 1981.