Sigfried Giedion

Sigfried Giedion ( born April 14, 1888 in Prague, † April 9, 1968 in Zurich, partly written Siegfried ) was a Swiss historian of architecture.

Life

Sigfried Giedion was the son of a weaving factory from Lake Zug, at first he studied engineering in Vienna. Apparently because he did not want to enter the family business, he wrote poetry and plays (one of which was performed at the Max Reinhardt at the intimate theater ) and heard art history at Henry Wölfflin, where he received his doctorate in 1922, the late Baroque and Romantic Classicism. Due to this work, AE Brinckmann wanted him to Cologne pick, he refused, however, to go back in the academic field. In 1923 he attended the Bauhaus, where he met Walter Gropius. Since this encounter, he worked professionally increasingly with the Bauhaus and its protagonist and himself became a pioneer of modernism.

In 1928, he was - along with Le Corbusier and Helene de Mandrot - co-founder of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Foundation of Modern ( CIAM ), the first Secretary General, he was. In the same year he became involved in the initiative group for the Werkbund Neubühl, whose board he served until 1939. Even as the owner of Doldertalhäuser that he wanted to make a manifesto of the new style in Switzerland, and as the founder of Wohnbedarf AG he was involved - as ever in numerous publications in international journals, whose launch its commitment to Le Corbusier's design of the League of Nations building in Geneva had been 1927.

1938/39, Giedion taught at Harvard University. His local Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1941 found reflected in his major work, the standard history of modern architecture, Space, Time & Architecture (German Space, Time and Architecture ). In 1946 he received his first teaching position at the ETH Zurich. He taught in the following period up to the 1960s, alternating in Switzerland and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. During this time he wrote in a regular sequence editor in the CIAM or in sole authorship of his findings of the second modernity, about the cultural pessimism Mechanization Takes Command of 1948 (Eng. Mechanization ).

Giedion was married to the art historian Carola Giedion - Welcker.

Works

  • Late Baroque and Romantic Classicism, 1922
  • Building in France, building in iron, building in ferroconcrete, Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928 (reprint: Berlin: Gebr man, 2000)
  • Liberated Living, Zurich: Orell Füssli Verl, 1929
  • Space, Time & Architecture: the growth of a new tradition in 1941, German Space, Time and Architecture: d emergence of e new tradition last one: Birkhäuser, 6, unveränd. Nachdr 2000, ISBN 978-3-7643-5407-7
  • Mechanization Takes Command, 1948, dt Mechanization. A contribution to anonymous history, Frankfurt am Main: Athenaeum 1987.
  • Architecture and community. Hamburg: Rowohlt 1956 or the ISBN.
  • Le Corbusier and the architectural expression of this time, in: Le Corbusier, exhibition catalog for the exhibition at the House of German Art crafts in Frankfurt am Main in 1958
  • The Eternal Present, 1964, dt Eternal Present: A Beitr to constancy and change, Cologne: DuMont, 2 vols, 1964-1965
  • Architecture and the phenomenon of change: The three concepts of space in d architecture, Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1969
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