Space, Time and Architecture

The Growth of a New Tradition, Fifth Revised and Enlarged Edition

Sigfried Giedion

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780674254053
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

"This new edition ensures that the book will continue to be internationally acknowledged as the standard work on the development of modern architecture." -Walter Gropius "A remarkable accomplishment... one of the most valuable reference books for students and professionals concerned with the reshaping of our environment. " -José Luis Sert A milestone in modern thought, Space, Time and Architecture has been reissued many times since its first publication in 1941 and translated into half a dozen languages. In this revised edition of Sigfried Giedion's classic work, major sections have been added and there are 81 new illustrations.The chapters on leading contemporary architects have been greatly expanded. There is new material on the later development of Frank Lloyd Wright and the more recent buildings of Walter Gropius, particularly his American Embassy in Athens. In his discussion of Le Corbusier, Mr. Giedion provides detailed analyses of the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Le Corbusier's only building in the United States, and his Priory of La Tourette near Lyons. There is a section on his relations with his clients and an assessment of his influence on contemporary architecture, including a description of the Le Corbusier Center in Zurich (designed just before his death), which houses his works of art. The chapters on Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto have been brought up to date with examples of their buildings in the sixties. There is an entirely new chapter on the Danish architect Jørn Utzon, whose work, as exemplified in his design for the Sydney Opera House, Mr. Giedion considers representative of post–World War II architectural concepts.A new essay, "Changing Notions of the City, " traces the evolution of the structure of the city throughout history and examines current attempts to deal with urban growth, as shown in the work of such architects as José Luis Sert, Kenzo Tange, and Fumihiko Maki. Mr. Sert's Peabody Terrace is discussed as an example of the interlocking of the collective and individual spheres. Finally, the conclusion has been enlarged to include a survey of the limits of the organic in architecture.

PART I HISTORY A PART OF LIFE

INTRODUCTION

Unknown in the United States and using a language that is foreign to me, I must seek the shortest way to direct contact with an American public. The way of personal contact is always the shortest route to understanding, not merely in personal but in general matters. Let me begin then by saying a few words about where I come from and where I intend to go — for these facts have a bearing upon the discussion that follows.

Heinrich Wölfflin: contrasting periods

As an art historian I am a disciple of Heinrich Wölfflin. In our personal contacts with him as well as through his distinguished lectures, we, his pupils, learned to grasp the spirit of an epoch. Wölfflin’s incisive analysis made clear to us the true meaning and significance of a painting or a piece of sculpture.

He delighted in contrasting one period with another. He employed this method most effectively both in his teaching and in his books — in his Renaissance and Baroque (1889), in Classical Art (1899), in which the fifteenth century is opposed to the sixteenth, and even in his Principles of Art (Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 1915), which had just appeared when I studied under him at Munich. Many of his pupils have tried to emulate this method of contrasting styles, but none have achieved the same depth and directness.

Late Baroque and Romantic Classicism

In my own first book, Late Baroque and Romantic Classicism (Munich, 1922, written as a thesis), I tried to follow Wölfflin’s method. The periods contrasted were the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, both periods of classicism. The Louis XVI style formed in shape and structure the end of late baroque tendencies, with classicism serving as its framework. The classicism of the beginning of the nineteenth century found its most significant outlet in that country of romantics, Germany. In the architecture of the time the trend toward an individualistic isolation of rooms from each other was nowhere so strongly marked as it was in Germany — in the work of K. F. Schinkel, for example. This was the true architectural equivalent of the individualism of the romantic poets.

I called this period one of romantic classicism. Classicism in both periods was only a coloring — a transitory fact, as I would say now. The essential characteristic of this time was that, beneath the classic exterior, the baroque inheritance had begun to disintegrate and nineteenth-century tendencies had begun to appear.

The problem which fascinated me was how our epoch had been formed, where the roots of present-day thought lay buried. This problem has fascinated me from the time I first became capable of reasoning about it until today.

Heinrich Wölfflin was the pupil of Jakob Burckhardt, and succeeded him as professor at the University of Basle when he was only twenty-seven years old. He later taught with great success at Berlin and Munich. Wölfflin always laid stress on the wide view taken by Jakob Burckhardt and often quoted Burckhardt’s words not only in his lectures but also in conversation. Thus the Swiss historical tradition formed the basis of our instruction in the science of art. But I am afraid that many of us did not grasp the significance of Burckhardt — a significance which reached beyond his métier — until much later.

Jakob Burckhardt: the integral treatment of a period

Jakob Burckhardt (1818–1897) was the great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance. He first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture, and architecture but for the social institutions of its daily life as well.

I shall mention only one book in this connection, his Civilization of the Renaissance, which first appeared in 1860. The English translation was produced in 1878. An extremely well-informed review of it appeared in the New York Herald for October 20, 1880. Burckhardt, who normally shrank from praise, was so pleased with this review that he wrote “Bravo!” at the bottom.

In Civilization of the Renaissance Burckhardt emphasized sources and records rather than his own opinions. He treated only fragments of the life of the period but treated them so skillfully that a picture of the whole forms in his readers’ minds. Jakob Burckhardt had no love for his own time: he saw during the forties an artificially constituted Europe which was on the verge of being overwhelmed by a flood of brutal forces. The South at that time appeared to have withdrawn from history; for Burckhardt it had the quiet of a tomb. So it was to the South, to Italy, that he turned for refuge from all those things for which he felt hatred and disgust. But Burckhardt was a man of great vitality, and a man of vitality cannot entirely desert his own time. His flight to Italy produced the finest traveler’s guide that has ever been written, his Cicerone (1855) — a book which has opened the eyes of four generations to the unique qualities of the Italian scene. His Civilization of the Renaissance aimed at an objective ordering of factual material, but in it his greatest efforts are devoted to uncovering the origins of the man of today. John Ruskin, Burckhardt’s immediate contemporary, also hated the age and sought to draw the means for its regeneration from other periods (though not those which preoccupied the Swiss historian).

Contemporary artists: significance for historical method

But I owe as large a debt to the artists of today as to these guides of my youth. It is they who have taught me to observe seriously objects which seemed unworthy of interest, or of interest only to specialists. Modern artists have shown that mere fragments lifted from the life of a period can reveal its habits and feelings; that one must have the courage to take small things and raise them to large dimensions.

These artists have shown in their pictures that the furniture of daily life, the unnoticed articles that result from mass production — spoons, bottles, glasses, all the things we look at hourly without seeing — have become parts of our natures. They have welded themselves into our lives without our knowing it.

My activities have brought me into friendly contact with the architects of our day. We have sat together in small groups about many tables in Europe, from Stockholm to Athens — not to discuss problems in art or matters of specialized detail but to determine as clearly as possible what directions housing, town planning, or regional planning had to take. As secretary to CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) during its entire existence (1928–1956), I acquired an insight into the problems of contemporary architecture from its inception.

THE HISTORIAN’S RELATION TO HIS AGE

The historian and contemporary conceptions

The historian, the historian of architecture especially, must be in close contact with contemporary conceptions.

Only when he is permeated by the spirit of his own time is he prepared to detect those tracts of the past which previous generations have overlooked.

History dynamic rather than static

History is not static but dynamic. No generation is privileged to grasp a work of art from all sides; each actively living generation discovers new aspects of it. But these new aspects will not be discovered unless the historian shows in his field the courage and energy which artists have displayed in their use of methods developed in their own epoch.

History is changed when touched

Architects have imitated other periods, taken over their special shapes and techniques, in the hope of escaping from transitory work and achieving a timeless rightness. And after a short time their buildings have become lifeless masses of stone, in spite of the incorporation into them of details from works of eternal beauty. These men possessed the exact contrary of the “Midas touch” — everything they put their hands on turned to dust rather than to gold. Today we can see why. History is not simply the repository of unchanging facts, but a process, a pattern of living and changing attitudes and interpretations. As such, it is deeply a part of our own natures. To turn backward to a past age is not just to inspect it, to find a pattern which will be the same for all comers. The backward look transforms its object; every spectator at every period — at every moment, indeed — inevitably transforms the past according to his own nature. Absolute points of reference are no more open to the historian than they are to the physicist; both produce descriptions relative to a particular situation.

Likewise there are no absolute standards in the arts: the nineteenth-century painters and architects who thought certain forms were valid for every age were mistaken. History cannot be touched without changing it.

The painters of our period have formulated a different attitude: lo spettatore nel centro del quadro. The observer must be placed in the middle of the painting, not at some isolated observation point outside. Modern art, like modern science, recognizes the fact that observation and what is observed form one complex situation — to observe something is to act upon and alter it.

The historian’s relation to the present

Historians quite generally distrust absorption into contemporary ways of thinking and feeling as a menace to their scientific detachment, dignity, and breadth of outlook. But one can be thoroughly the creature of one’s own period, embued with its methods, without sacrificing these qualities. Indeed, the historian in every field must be united with his own time by as widespread a system of roots as possible. The world of history, like the world of nature, explains itself only to those who ask the right questions, raise the right problems. The historian must be intimately a part of his own period to know what questions concerning the past are significant to it. Apart from this approach, history remains a wilderness of blank happenings in which no creative work is possible. Only dead chronologies and limited special studies will be produced. The historian detached from the life of his own time writes irrelevant history, deals in frozen facts. But it is his unique and nontransferable task to uncover for his own age its vital interrelationships with the past.

The historian cannot in actual fact detach himself from the life about him; he, too, stands in the stream. The ideal historian — out of the press of affairs, au-dessus de la mêlée, surveying all time and all existence from a lofty pedestal — is a fiction.

The historian, like every other man, is the creature of his time and draws from it both his powers and his weaknesses. By virtue of his calling he may survey a larger circle of events than his average contemporary, but this does not lift him out of his own historical setting. It is even to his advantage to be forced from his academic chair occasionally and made to participate in the common struggles of the moment. For direct contact with life and its necessities sharpens his abilities to penetrate the jungle of printed records to the unfalsified voices of the real actors.

Unfortunately the historian has often used his office to proclaim the eternal right of a static past. Ever since man recognized the impossibility of making objective judgments, such an attitude has been discredited. Today we consciously examine the past from the point of view of the present to place the present in a wider dimension of time, so that it can be enriched by those aspects of the past that are still vital. This is a matter concerning continuity but not imitation.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTINUITY

The need for a universal outlook

For planning of any sort our knowledge must go beyond the state of affairs that actually prevails. To plan we must know what has gone on in the past and feel what is coming in the future. This is not an invitation to prophecy but a demand for a universal outlook upon the world.

At the present time the difficult field of town planning seems to resist all handling. In times when a universal viewpoint existed no genius was required to produce urban treatments of high quality whose influence long outlasted the period of their creation. Achievements brought about for a specific purpose and a specific social class proved serviceable in a quite different period for different purposes and different groups. This was possible simply because the original creation came out of a universal point of view.

Today the urge toward such universality is deeply felt by everyone. It is the reaction against a whole century spent in living from day to day. What we see around us is the reckoning that this shortsightedness has piled up.

This living from day to day, from hour to hour, with no feeling for relationships, does not merely lack dignity; it is neither natural nor human. It leads to a perception of events as isolated points rather than as parts of a process with dimensions reaching out into history. The demand for a closer contact with history is the natural outcome of this condition. To have a closer contact with history: in other words, to carry on our lives in a wider time-dimension. Present-day happenings are simply the most conspicuous sections of a continuum; they are like that small series of wave lengths between ultraviolet and infra-red which translate themselves into colors visible to the human eye.

The destructive confusion of events in the world at large today is so great that the movement toward universality is clearly visible in the field of science and scholarship. The desire for similarity of methods in the separate sciences — including the social sciences — in philosophy, and in art, becomes more and more definite. Already the demand for a universal outlook upon the world has made itself felt in the college: intellectual connections between the various faculties are consciously being developed.

Everybody knows that we have far more means of bringing change under farsighted control than any of the peoples of earlier times. It is the new potentialities at our disposal which are the key to a new and balanced life for enormous numbers of men.

The desire for universality is an expression of the need we feel to master and coördinate these new potentialities.

It is always dangerous to assume that one’s own time has an exceptional importance. Even so, the years through which we are living seem to constitute a test period for mankind, a test of man’s ability to organize his own life.

CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

The need for a historical background

A wider survey of the whole domain of human activity is the unmistakable need of the century. It is in this connection that history can play an important role. One of the functions of history is to help us to live in a larger sense, in wider dimensions. This does not mean that we should copy the forms and attitudes of bygone periods, as the nineteenth century did, but that we should conduct our lives against a much wider historical background.

Consequences of living from day to day

In the part of contemporary history we shall be concerned with, the most important developments are the changes that have come about in daily life.

The eternal complaint of the nineteenth century was that all the dignity had gone out of ordinary life. And ordinary life did lose its dignity from the moment it was put on an exclusively day-to-day basis. People lost all sense of playing a part in history; they were either indifferent to the period in which they lived or they hated it. When they compared themselves with the people of other periods their activities seemed unimportant and without significance, either good or bad.

Indifference to the immediate past; its effects

The same feeling produced an extreme disregard for the immediate past — for contemporary history, that is. Unconsciously, in their matter-of-fact constructions, the men of the nineteenth century were producing the constituent facts from which the future was to take its structure. They did not see this, however; indeed, it is sometimes not recognized today. The result was not merely the neglect of contemporary history but something still worse — the wanton destruction of the objects and the records which were essential to its understanding. Later periods will be forced to leave great gaps in their accounts of the modes of existence of the nineteent...