kostof,s themarkofsiegfriedgiedion

5/26/2018 Kostof,S TheMarkOfSiegfriedGiedion

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Architecture, You and Him: The Mark of Sigfried GiedionAuthor(s): Spiro KostofSource: Daedalus, Vol. 105, No. 1, In Praise of Books (Winter, 1976), pp. 189-204Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & SciencesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024393

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SPIRO KOSTOF

Architecture, You and Him :The Mark of Sigfried Giedion

Nothing is more embarassing today than when small-minded people, taking advantageof the fact that they have been born later in time, venture to criticize those who firstopened up paths along which we are now treading. Architecture, You andMe (195 8)

These words, written by Sigfried Giedion in defense of Alois Riegl's proscriptive viewof architectural space at the turn of the century, are seasonable for critics of Giedion'sown contribution to the history of architecture. His productive life was long. The firstbook he wrote, the doctoral thesis for Heinrich W?lfflin on late Baroque and RomanticClassicism, came out in 1922. The last, dealing largely with the built world of ancientRome, was issued posthumously in 1971. This final book, Architecture and the Phenomena of Transition, was the third volume in a series on the architecture of antiquitythat occupied Giedion's later years. The first two volumes m the series were devoted toprehistoric art and the architecture of Egypt and Mesopotamia.Now from Schinkel and Klenze backward to Rabirius, Senmut, and the cave atLascaux is a mighty distance. And it is not in chronological spread alone that Giedion'soutput is remarkable. The artifacts he chose to study ranged in size from the vast canvas of theWestern city at one end to the hammock and the Yale lock at the other. Todo justice to this various subject matter, Giedion assumed professional roles thatincluded the critic and historian of architecture, the cultural historian, the journalist,social anthropologist, industrial archaeologist, and psychologist. He held degrees inmechanical engineering as well as in art history. For twenty years he was at the forefront of a campaign to uphold and disseminate the principles of theModern Movementin architecture, a task he performed, with the ardent enthusiasm of the organizer andpropagandist, as secretary of the Congr?s internationaux d'architecture moderne(CIAM). It takes a unique gift, surely, to tread at once the paths of Le Corbusier andW?lfflin.

We have no right to expect that the thought of fifty years stretching over millenniaof history and several distinct fields should stand unchallenged in all its detail, especiallysince Giedion rejected the relative safety of positivist research for a plucky historicalactivism that championed as universal verities matters of variable interpretation. Itwould be small-minded indeed to belittle the achievement of so protean a spirit for itsflaws. But to understand the unusual, one has to describe it first, and the description of

189


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190 SPIRO KOSTOFideas presumes their criticism. We cannot deny the impact of Giedion on the history ofman-made things. How many books of history, after all, have had the phenomenal circulation of Space, Time and Architecture? In order to take the measure ofthat impact,however, we must go beyond the devotion ofHommage ? Giedion (Basel and Stuttgart, 1971). We must try, in Giedion's own phraseology, to separate the constituentfacts of his work from the merely transitory. This essay ismeant as a step towardthat end.

As Giedion tells it, the path from Sp?tbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus toPhenomena of Transition is not aberrant, any more than is his multidisciplinaryapproach. It was simply a matter of answering some insistent questions?that and apoint of view. The point of view, as distinct from his method, was indebted neither tohis technical training in Vienna nor to his later art historical studies with W?lfflin. Itderived, rather, from the revolutionary artists of his youth who shattered the static,monodirectional conception of space prevalent till then. The decisive impetus for mywork, to quote Giedion, has been given by contemporary artists, who, by conceivinga new interpretation of space [i.e., Cubism], broadened the history of optical perception. Taking the present time as my starting point, I have traced this history. 1 One

might think of Giedion, then, as the propounder of the Cubist view of man-made environment.

The questions, starting with the modern period as their canvas and working backward, had to do with simultaneity, with origins, with constancy and change. The subject of the first book was less important in itself than for what it could demonstrate?that theW?lfflinian opposites of Classicism and Baroque, rather than being sequential,could coexist within one epoch, and that, concomitantly, one of them could span a historical frame that embraced two divergent epochs. The later eighteenth century, andespecially the Louis XVI style, contained late Baroque tendencies within a Classicalstructure. The early nineteenth century in Germany used Classicism to temper itsromantic flare. I questioned how it had been possible for Classicism to take two different forms. 2 His answer was that Classicism is not a style; Classicism is a coloring. 3

Equipped with the discovery thatW?lfflinian formalism was of surface value only,that architecture resided deeper than binding conventions of form, Giedion could recognize the fallacy of the modern battle to find suitable modes of design for the postIndustrial world. The dominant historicism of the nineteenth century had squanderedenergy on frills. The essence of the struggle lay elsewhere. A handful of his own contemporaries were now leading the way in that direction. The Bauhaus under Walter

Gropius had been revolutionizing design education since 1919. The premise of theBauhaus method was precisely the unlearning of historical styles, the forging of a modern idiom out of the union of art and industry. Le Corbusier's Vers une architectureappeared in 1923. The following year Giedion visited him in Paris. The enfant terribleof French architecture showed me his Pavillion de l'Esprit Nouveau which he hadbuilt on the outermost fringe of the International Exhibition of Arts and Crafts. . . . [It]had more vitality than anything else in the exhibition. 4 Le Corbusier also impressedupon Giedion that the sources of the new language of design typified by the Pavillion


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THE MARK OF SIGFRIED GIEDION 191were to be found in the iron architecture of the nineteenth century which came moststrongly to the fore in the great world's fairs. 5 This view Giedion now sought to docu

ment, first in a book that surveyed French experiments with industrial materials, withiron and ferroconcrete (Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton,1800 bis 1927 [Leipzig, 1928]), and then in the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, whichhe was invited to deliver at Harvard in 193 7-1938. These famous lectures, publishedin 1941 as Space, Time and Architecture, enlarged upon the theme by seeking the conceptual background of the new architecture beyond the nineteenth century. There wasindeed a development from Brunelleschi to Gropius and Le Corbusier, but this development could not be traced through the traditional grand sequence of styles which culminated in the confused eclecticism of the last one hundred years. The nineteenthcentury was the Great Divide. Thinking of form as fashion, it had managed for the firsttime in history to sever the two ingredients of a wholesome culture, feeling and reality?or, to phrase it in architectural terms, form and structure, expression and construction, art and industry. Itwas this rift that theModern Movement was now tryingto heal. One important aspect of the problem was mechanization, and in the next

major book Giedion set out to chronicle how handicraft yielded to the machine, byfocusing on such diverse headings as agriculture, breadmaking, meat production, furniture, household management, and the bath (Mechanization Takes Command [Oxfordand New York, 1948]).

What, despite this near fatal rift, were the stabilizing elements that put us back onthe road to recovery? The foremost question was the relation between constancy andchange. Constancy does not imply mere continuation, but rather the ability of thehuman mind suddenly to bring to life things that have been left slumbering throughlong ages. 6 Architects such as Le Corbusier sought the inspiration of basic abstracttruths in the built environment of the past, constituent facts that went beyond thebarren tyranny of the styles; just as contemporary artists, leaping further back, recalledin their images the symbols of primeval man. History is a single entity where past,present, and future are intermingled. The past is now and the present is eternal. Tograsp the meaning of the twentieth century, one has to go back to the beginning.So Giedion now directed his attention to what he called the Eternal Present. Hisstudy began with the conceptual world of the Old Stone Age (The Beginnings of Art[New York, 1962]). Having established that cave art can never be considered naturalistic, he went on to demonstrate the similarities inmethod between the abstraction ofthe prehistoric artist and that of twentieth-century masters such as Picasso, Paul Klee,and Mir?. Transparency and the superimposition of bodies were common to bothvisions because they shared the motivating concept of simultaneity in time. Thevisual disembodiment of Lascaux, which is not yet bound by a dimensional construct ofvertical and horizontal coordinates, Giedion termed pre-architectural. He followedthis book with an assessment of architectural space proper, as itwas first developed bythe earliest high civilizations, Egypt and Sumer (The Beginnings ofArchitecture [NewYork, 1964]). Whatever the individual differences between these two literate cultures,they both built within the same space conception, the first of three that were to governthe entire history of architecture. Buildings in the first space conception are seen as


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192 SPIRO KOSTOFsculptural volumes, space-emanating rather than space-containing. Greece, too, for allits discreteness in political and social outlook, was bound by this same space conception.

The change into the second space conception, the shaping of interior space, cameunder imperial Rome. That iswhat the final book, Architecture and the Phenomena ofTransition, is about?the Roman preoccupation with the possibilities of architecturalenclosure. This was to remain the principal concern ofWestern architecture until theeclectic jumble of the nineteenth century. And then, firmly and courageously, a newcoherent vision emerged, the third and final space conception of the Modern Movement. The book concludes with a recapitulation of that achievement as itwas first outlined in Space, Time and Architecture thirty years earlier?the brave new architectureof Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and their precursors and followers,which combined mid-space volumes with prodigies of contained space. So the historian's work was completed, the past and present made one, the circle closed.From Giedion's corner there is logic and coherence to this personal progressthrough history. Looking back, it is all stitched together by one paramount concern,that the all-embracing quality of any art is how man experiences space: space conception. 7 His history of architecture, then, is primarily a history of space. The other

major emphasis in his work, problems of engineering and themachine, is correlative: asuitable technology is needed to realize a new space conception, such as the Romanshad for their vaulted interiors and the twentieth century for its skyscrapers and soaringshells.From the outside, Giedion's progress may seem less orderly, his contribution eclectic and derivative more than original. The links among his various books are not particularly strong. There is, in the first phase of his career, a good art historical study of aspecific period, Romantic Classicism. Then begins the long apologia for the ModernMovement and its self-avowed debt to the metal-and-glass architecture of the nineteenth century?first expounded for the English-speaking world in Space, Time and

Architecture, and subsequently updated in the several revised editions of that popularbook and in the collection of essays entitled Architecture, You and Me (Cambridge,Mass., 1958). Mechanization Takes Command is basically an independent piece ofresearch, a selective account of machines and mechanized procedures motivated asmuch by a fascination with this anonymous history as by the dictates of the statedtheme: to discern how far mechanization corresponds with and to what extent it con

tradicts the unalterable laws of human nature. 8 The final phase consists of a freewheeling interpretation of the art and architecture of antiquity with dutiful, but not forthatmatter always convincing, hookups with the present.

Giedion's approach toward all this disparate material owes much to his early training as engineer and art historian and to the German art historical establishment whichcontrolled the field both before and afterWorld War I.The attention paid to structuralmatters, the affinity with the engineers of the nineteenth century?these can be tracedback to the years at the Technische Hochschule of Vienna as well as to the call of Versune architecture. The leitmotif of space, however galvanized by the example of Cubism, allies Giedion with a central line of German art history?with Riegl and Schmarzow and Paul Frankl. Riegl's voice in Sp?tr?mische Kunstindustrie can be heard


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THE MARK OF SIGFRIED GIEDION 193behind the argument ofMechanization, that culture registers through humble, everyday things as readily as it does through monuments? The sun ismirrored even in acoffee spoon. 9 The history of types propounded in that same book ( The history ofstyles follows its theme along a horizontal direction ;the history of types along a verticalone. . . .We are interested in following the growth of phenomena, or if one will, inreading their line of fate, over wide spans of time. 10) is clearly akin to Panofskianiconology. Tracing the career of the common lock from late Gothic times to Linus

Yale, Jr., to take but one example, corresponds in intention to the charted lineage ofFather Time or Pandora's Box. And, finally, W?lfflin hovers over everything Giedionwrote, as is evident not least of all in the general use of critically juxtaposed visual

images.There are, according to this external view, two personae behind Giedion's work:the critic as propagandist of theModern Movement and philosopher of the modern

way of life, and a historian with an uncommon reach and a syncretistic process. If thetwo are not entirely separable, each may be said to suffer, as much as benefit, from thisassociation. History is paraded as the great justifier of the new architecture, as if historycould not be called upon to justify any movement of the past or present. And the lesstopical subjects of research are permeated with gratuitous value judgments that spring,independently of the cultural context of the specific period under study, from Giedion'sown beliefs about what is essential and what ephemeral in the human enterprise.

Which of these two views is right? IsGiedion's work an engaging potpourri, or acohesive and original system? The answer lies, in the end, in the attitude one takestoward the shape and purpose of history. If by system one understands a dispassionate, carefully thought-out structure for the ordering of human artifacts, Giedioncannot compare with his teacher W?lfflin, Frankl and his formidable System der

Kunstwissenschaft (1938), or other peers in art history like Fo?illon or Panofsky. Butwithin Giedion's own concept of what history is and what it does, his behavior is intelligible, indeed, logical.

History, for Giedion, is insight into a moving process of life. 11 It is akin to biology in that it is concerned with the problem of growth and development, but not withProgress as the nineteenth century understood the word. There is nothing predictableor systematic about this growth. It cannot be documented by the accumulation of facts,but must be sought in the living forces and spiritual attitudes which shaped the variousperiods. Sometimes the prime evidence is not what is most apparent; it lies buriedbeneath the surface. Historians must know where to look and how. They must learn todistinguish between constituent facts, that is, those tendencies which, when they aresuppressed, inevitably reappear, 12 and transitory facts, which are only of passing value, however pervasive and brilliant they may seem for a while. Transitory facts do notrepresent the innermost depths of a period, its inner vigor. 13 Style itself can be atransitory fact; to be concerned with styles exclusively, to compare their similarities anddifferences, is not sufficient and may, as in the case of the nineteenth century, beextremely misleading.To tell the two of them apart is not easy; that iswhere the historian's judgmentmust come in. Inmaking the choice between transitory and constituent facts, the histo


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194 SPIRO KOSTOFrian must be guided by two interlinked aims: to extricate those trends which are morelikely to produce a solution to the real problems of the age, 14 and to say something significant about our contemporary dilemmas. To put it another way, the historianshould be interested primarily in those problems of bygone civilizations which reveala deep affinity with the present-day situation. 15 The task of history is to explain thepresent and, to the extent possible, predict the future. To be able to do this, the historian must be thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his own time, for only then will hebe able to ask of the past such questions as had been overlooked by his more detachedcolleagues. Without this commitment to elucidate the present, only dead chronologiesand limited special studies will be produced. 16 History is not above the fray. The historian must force himself from his academic chair occasionally and made to participate in the common struggles of the moment. 17 The parallel is with the modernpainter. To believe that history is objective, its perspective fixed and unchanging, itsfindings true for all time, is to adopt the Renaissance view of the individual spectatorand the unique vantage point. The painters of our period have formulated a differentattitude: lo spettatore nel centro del quadro. The observer must be placed in the middleof the painting, not at some isolated observation point outside. Likewise the historianmust recognize that observation and what is observed form one complex situation?toobserve something is to act upon and alter it. 18It is clear, then, that the historian cannot study indiscriminately the material evidence of the past. He cannot believe all he sees. In architecture, a sedulously carefulselection of buildings is necessary to bring out those values which are worthy of forminga part of the history of the development of architecture. 19 Thoroughness is of noaccount. Since it is not evolutionary progress but an erratic and organic growth one isdocumenting, obedience to strict chronology has no particular merit. Connections mustbe made when they are valid regardless of the intervening period of time. The meaning of history arises in the uncovering of relationships. 20 History creates constellationsfrom far-flung fragments in space and time. A few of them explained in detail willform a pattern which the reader can then act upon and enhance through new andmanifold links that spring to his mind. Whether the fragments selected for scrutiny areformal monuments, utilitarian structures, or everyday artifacts does not in itself matter,any more than itmatters in painting whether the subject is a grand historical tableau, agenre scene, or a still life.

Now most of these pronouncements are anathema to the standard art historian.They resurrect precisely the attitudes which the founding fathers sought to overcome asthey set about re-creating the field along scientific lines at the turn of the century.Architectural history had traditionally been the bedfellow of design. Its study figuredprominently within the architectural curriculum because itwas believed to have directbearing on the activity at the drafting table. The cozy involvement of the makers andinterpreters of architecture had been the primary reason why leaders of theModernMovement including Gropius denounced history as the single most reactionary forceagainst the flowering of a modern design attuned to the mood and reality of the postIndustrial world. History had nurtured nineteenth-century historicism; it had drownedfree imagination, and it had justified the long string of revivals that had confounded allattempts to break out of the past toward a contemporary architectural idiom.


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THE MARK OF SIGFRIED GIEDION 195If, for Gropius and the Bauhaus, historical perspective had to be rejected outrightto liberate contemporary thought, for the historian, too, an affirmation of independenceseemed appropriate in order to evaluate the past, free of the onus of blatantly proppingup the present. Art history had been the accomplice of the nineteenth-century searchfor a new style, a renascence of form. It had been made to bless or condemn the stylisticwhimsies of the practitioner. To declare their autonomy, historians now engaged in a

two-pronged reform. A theoretical basis was slowly developed so that the criticalanalysis of art and architecture could be undertaken within a rational, consistentframework of principles. At that same time, historians tried to put some respectabledistance between themselves and the present by electing to study historical phenomenafor their own sake, with no morals drawn for the contemporary situation. JakobBurckhardt was hailed by Giedion's generation as the great pioneer; his book on theCivilization of the Renaissance published in 1860 aimed at an objective ordering offactual material. 21 Soon there was the second generation of theW?lfflins and Rieglsand Schmarzows, of Heinrich von Geymiiller and Cornelius Gurlitt. By the time theyoung Frankl, with whom Giedion took a seminar inMunich, was writing his Prindples ofArchitectural History in 1914, he could state definitively that :The history of architecture was separated from artistic development and became an historicaldiscipline. It was no longer pursued in order to find new prototypes and to recommend certainstyles. It now had its own importance as part of humanistic scholarship ; it led to the understanding of all styles in their limitations and development and, in addition, showed the impossibility of a Renaissance in the literal sense.22

Frankl was not unaware of the dawn of the Modern Movement. Today ... westand expectantly at the beginning of a new development. Despite the revelations of thepast, we cannot know what lies in the future. But we do know that we have made anew start. . . . 23 His position as a professional historian, however, was clear. His discipline could not presume to deal with theModern Movement: first, because itwas toorecent to assess, and second, because itwas by self-description ahistorical. It followedupon the four phases of architectural style between 1420 and 1900 which Frankl hadclassified and analyzed inPrinciples and their inevitable end as a revelation of humanhistory. 24 The Movement was a virgin birth which the historian had no way of handling. The new architecture was, as Gropius explained, not a branch of an old treebut a fresh growth that sprang directly from scientific teamwork (as opposed to aesthetics of design) and the realities of industrial standardization and materials. Such thingswere outside the province of architectural history.Giedion's iconoclasm consists in questioning the premises of this new architecturalhistory, or rather, in trying to bring this nascent discipline closer to the premises of thenew architecture. In his doctoral thesis he had already enlarged the permissible scope ofarchitectural history by including urban schemes in his treatment, along with singlemonuments and their interiors. The mutuality of architecture and city planning?theurban responsibility of single architectural acts?became one of the leitmotifs of Giedion's work: itwas also an underlying tenet of the new architecture. Through his activechampionship of theModern Movement, beginning with the 192 3 piece forWerk onthe Bauhaus, Giedion the historian was now challenging several other restrictions of


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196 SPIRO KOSTOFhis field. The history of architecture did not have to stop with 1900 because the historical styles seemed to have spent themselves by then. There was more to this history thanthe succession of styles. The new architecture was not ahistorical, merely astylar ; therefore, the history of theModern Movement could be written. The admitted inspirationfor the modern idiom came from industrial materials, mass production, and the mechanized procedures of assemblage. Now these phenomena did have a history that couldbe traced at least as far back as 1800. The research was bound to concentrate on functional buildings, ordinarily outside the scope of architectural history?buildings such asbridges, train sheds, warehouses, hangars, and markets. Itwould uncover the contribution of engineers in the built environment of the post-Industrial era. This area ofinvestigation was ignored by architectural historians because they accepted thatdichotomy between architecture as an art and mere building promulgated by thearchitectural establishment of the nineteenth century. Frankl, in his Principles, went sofar as to blame the difficulties the nineteenth century had in creating a decisive architectural language, at least in part, on the rise of utilitarian building types. But the leaders of theModern Movement no longer recognized their profession as a high art at theexclusive disposition of the ruling classes. They saw in the utilitarian viewpoint the onlygenuinely creative impulse of the nineteenth century. Gropius spoke of teamwork andserving the people; Le Corbusier extolled the engineer's esthetic. If one wished towrite the history of the Modern Movement, one could not but associate oneself withthis revised definition of architecture.

Bauen in Frankreich was written with these considerations in mind. The dates ofthe period covered are 1800-1927. Rather than stop short of the modernist experi

ments, the whole object of the book is to lead up to them, to put them in a historicalcontext, to give them roots. The buildings selected for this purpose are machine-ageproducts representative of a functional vernacular. This other side of the nineteenthcentury is looked at positively, as the background of modern architecture in France,through carefully staged visual comparisons: the ground story of Labrouste's Biblioth?que S te.-Genevi?ve and Le Corbusier's Maison Cook; Jules Saulnier's chocolatefactory inNoisiel-sur-Marne of 1871-72, and Mies van der Rohe's housing scheme forthe Stuttgart Werkbund of 1927; the main entrance hall for the Paris exhibition of1878 by Gustave Eiffel, and Gropius' Bauhaus at Dessau. The last part of the bookcollects images of the new architecture in the twentieth century: Tony Gamier's Cit?industrielle, Le Corbusier, Mallet-Stevens, Henry Sauvage, Andr? Lurcat. ThisFrench corpus was extended to include Germany and Holland in a small book of photographs published the following year (Befreites Wohnen [Zurich and Leipzig,1929]). In the same years, Giedion also emerged as spokesman for modern architecturein another capacity: as advocate journalist and initiator of the Congr?s internationaux

d'architecture moderne (CIAM), the first of which was held at Chateau de la Sarraz,Switzerland, in June of 1928. Thus, Giedion effectively denied the asserted independence of history from practice.This vigorous two-front defense launched Giedion as the official historian of theModern Movement. Whatever their antipathy toward architectural history as itwasbeing written, the modern masters did not want to be left out of history permanently.


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THE MARK OF SIGFRIED GIEDION 197Like some present-day radicals who reject society as it is but still insist on their fullrights of citizenship, including vindication in the courts, they chose to rebel against historicism without being denied the benefits of history. They sought to shape their ownspecial pedigree. Le Corbusier, more than any other, set down the rules of this exclusive relationship with the past. In Vers une architecture, historical styles are repeatedlydecried. Architecture has nothing to do with the various 'styles.' The styles of Louis

XIV, XV, XVI, or Gothic, are to architecture what a feather is on a woman's head; it issometimes pretty, though not always, and never anything more. 25 Besides examplesof the engineer's aesthetic which are selected for praise, the book freely admires a number of past monuments for what they represent that is elemental to architecture. Withno attention to their styles, a Hindoo temple, Hagia Sophia, the Petit Trianon, theParthenon are admiringly illustrated and made to demonstrate general principles suchas rhythm of volumes in space, the interdependence of plan and elevation, regulatinglines, and, in the case of the Parthenon, austerity, a high level of mind reached throughnobility of aim and the sacrifice of all that is accidental in Art. 26This same attitude Giedion assumed and refined in Space, Time and Architecture,his next major step in the historical rehabilitation of theModern Movement. Theestablishment of categories within which architecture could be analyzed had been common practice among the new historians. Frankl, for example, settled on four such cate

gories in his Principles for the analysis of his phases of architectural style: spatial form,corporeal form, visible form, and purposive intention. Giedion's approach differedfrom the critical convenience of constituent elements such as these and the similarabstractions of Le Corbusier. His own constituent facts were more specific in terms ofarchitectural experience, at the same time that they were astylar in application. Threeexamples should suffice. One of them is the interweaving of horizontal and verticalplanes, a recurrent feature of the progressive design of the twentieth century. Giedioncan link a drawing by Theo van Doesburg of ca. 1920 that demonstrates this moderntendency with Giuseppe Valadier's scheme for the Piazza del Pop?lo in Rome wheredifferent levels are brought into the same composition. Or again, Le Corbusier'sscheme for Algiers in 1931 could be related backward in time to the Lansdowne Crescent at Bath in terms of two constituent facts: the undulating wall, which goes back toBorromini, and the setting of a great residential complex in direct contact with nature,a revolutionary concept ofman-made environment first encountered at Versailles.Such fundamental comparisons of their work with paragons of history wereacceptable to the leaders of theModern Movement. The main thing was Giedion's disavowal of the official architecture of the nineteenth century, against which they hadpitched their battle. This established his credentials with them. He was openly sympathetic to their goals and receptive of their arguments. And yet, unlike them, he wasimpartial in the sense that he did not himself make buildings and, therefore, presumably had no vested interest in his championship of the new architecture other than historical justice. The association was satisfactory to both parties. The modern mastershad gained an authoritative spokesman who would ease them into history, and Giedionhad found a way to make history an active participant in a continuing revolution. Asfor the scholarly establishment, it could not ignore or dismiss Giedion as a mere jour


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198 SPIRO KOSTOFnalist or pamphleteer. His credentials in that sphere were also solid. He had beentrained within the establishment and had demonstrated his ability to be counted amongthe foremost students of W?lfflin. He never rejected outright W?lfflinian principles,and he spoke as warmly of him and Burckhardt as his mentors as he did of his spiritualaffinity to the avant-garde artists of his youth.

Space, Time and Architecture seems, then, at one level, to strike a balance betweentradition and innovation, between the perspective of the historian and the passionateloyalty of the advocate. Itwas of enormous help for the acceptance and popularizationof the modern idiom. We are familiar with the fact that the implications of the newarchitecture drew upon it the wrath of totalitarian regimes in the thirties, but we tendto forget what intense hostility there was toward it in this country at the time of the

Norton lectures. A young friend of mine, whose parents had built a modern house inNew England about then, told me of the harassment they endured daily, as thoughthey were an undesirable element that had moved into the neighborhood. Giedion'streatise and his work as secretary of the CIAM were also crucial in holding togetherand reconciling the disparate personalities of theMovement itself. He was a secretaryof genius, as E.Maxwell Fry has expressed it, because his genius as an historian wasemployed upon the subject matter of the revolution he superintended. 27 And Giedion's book was important in one other sphere: the methodology of architectural history.We have already noted his all-embracing focus on man-made environment, fromfurniture to the cityscape, a historical attitude which corresponded purposely to thetotal architecture that Gropius talked about. This democracy of environmental outlook, so new to professional historians, was enhanced by the inclusion in it of a host ofsignificant, practical building types, opened up to history through Giedion's rejection ofthe formalist line of his own teachers.

As crucial as the broadening of the historian's scope was Giedion's concern with thehistorian's humanity. The extraordinary comprehensiveness and precision of the historical systems before World War I had gone a long way toward objectifying the creative experience. It was Giedion who reminded us that buildings are not entirelyquantifiable objects, that architecture responds to the emotional needs of a culture, andthat, therefore, the history of architecture is as much a matter of the sympatheticunderstanding of human motives as it is an ordering of visible properties.Giedion's concern with the spirit of architecture had little to do with the determinism of Zeitgeist theories or Dvorak's Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte.Sometimes, as in the nineteenth century, a period may miss the call of its own conscience. The choice is there for it to build truly, in accordance with its genuineimpulses, or to build through false or superficial motivation?and it chooses wrongly.There is no total consistency in the spirit of an age, such as Dvorak believed to be thecase. Similarly, there is no total accounting of architecture in sociological or economicterms. Architecture exists at two different levels. It is, on the one hand, the product oftopical factors?social, economic, technical, ethnological. But once it appears it constitutes an organism in itself, with its own character and its own continuing life. 28Whereas the origin of an architectural idea may be described in terms of the externalconditions of the age, its value cannot. It is therefore possible to view architecture out of


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THE MARK OF SIGFRIED GIEDION 199its historical context, as an organism in its own right; to recognize that it can reach outbeyond the period of its birth, beyond the social class that called it into being, beyondthe style towhich it belongs. 29 Modern architecture is thus rooted both in the realitiesof its own age and in trends that reach toward it from various stages of past history.

But, for all its positive virtue, Space, Time and Architecture is not a balancedbook. We can see in hindsight how often the advocate led the historian astray, and weare forced to conclude that there is after all something to be said for the detachment ofhistory, its place aux dessus de lam?l?e. The evangelism of the modern masters foundin Giedion's thought total and uncritical acceptance. Revolutions have need of strawmen to knock down :they cannot be expected to be level-headed or fair about the orderthey are overturning. The historian presumably steers revolutionary hyperbole tocalmer levels of discourse. The bitter and unremitting condemnation of nineteenthcentury official architecture, amatter of course for Gropius and Le Corbusier, is disruptive history. Giedion was obviously less concerned with explaining what did happenthen and why than in positing what ought to have happened. The nineteenth centurywas eternally uncertain, eternally doubtful. 30 Its art was more shameless thananything previously known in history ;31 its ornament, sickly and debased ;32 itsarchitecture, pseudomonumental and guilty of spatial disintegration. Truly creativevoices in vain spoke against the fakery and deceit of the ruling taste. As snails destroya fresh green sprout, the smear of the press and the attitude of the public destroyed anynew architectonic beginning. 33 And so on. Nowhere in Space, Time and Architecture, or in the books that follow it, is there a sense of the emotional basis of revivalism,its associative force, the earnest search for cultural identity which it represented. Toview the revivals as mindless imitation iswilfully to ignore the fevered r??valuation ofthe past they illustrate at every turn. Giedion's own assessment of what history shoulddo is plainly applicable to what historicism did do. To turn backward to a past age isnot just to inspect it. . . .The backward look transforms its object: every spectator atevery period?at every moment indeed?inevitably transforms the past according tohis own nature. 34 Styles, in the abstract, may indeed be no more than the feather on a

woman's head; but to take the nineteenth-century parade of styles at face value, not tosee in them the instrument of a great cultural dialectic, amounts to a mischievous obfuscation of the essence of style. If style ismade to correspond to the sum total of certainvisual conventions, the Modern Movement was itself a style, despite Giedion's vehement denial that this was ever the case. Indeed, the 1932 exhibition at theMuseum of

Modern Art inNew York organized by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnsonproperly identified the visual coherence of the new architecture and labeled it theInternational Style, a label which Giedion never forgave. And, if style is taken to bemore than form, or rather if it is recognized that cultural, social, and even psychological assumptions underlie formal conventions, then the nineteenth-century battle of thestyles deserves far greater attention than that of a historical fashion show, and indeedit has been getting it in the last thirty years from less polemical historians. In the same

way, salon painting, which Giedion considered permanently banished to the basementof history, is now enjoying a serious reassessment.Style is a bad word for Giedion, that much is clear; but it is not easy to find out


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200 SPIRO KOSTOFwhat he understands the term to mean. He does not himself attempt a new definitionbeyond saying that it came into general use in the nineteenth century to characterizespecific historical periods according to a materialistic description of details of form. 35

This, of course, is a drastic reduction of one of the most intricate concepts of art history.The contrast it would seem iswith the essential form beneath the details, the framebeneath the style, what Kaschnitz-Weinberg called Struktur. This is really the basis ofGiedion's constituent facts, such as the interp?n?tration of horizontal and verticalplanes common to Van Doesburg and Valadier, or the undulating wall that linksBorromini with the Lansdowne Crescent and Le Corbusier's Algiers. But the point isthat the same Struktur-Analyse applied impartially to the official architecture of thenineteenth century would undoubtedly reveal substantive bonds between exponents ofhistoricism and the architects of theModern Movement. A good instance of this approach isPhilip Johnson's pairing of Schinkel andMies van der Rohe.36What is more, the qualities which according to Giedion would not allow us tothink of the Modern Movement as a style are themselves both ambivalent and undistinctive. There is, first, the New Regionalism. It boils down to the fact that differentcountries had different ways of expressing the general principles of theModern Movement. Now that we are separated by several decades from the birth period of the earlytwenties, Giedion wrote in 1954, we are able to discern that certain regional habitsand regional traditions lay concealed within the germinal nuclei of the various contemporary movements. 37 But regionalism has been recognized from the start as a basiccondition of international styles.We talk of English Gothic and German Baroque, andeven for the nineteenth century succinct discriminations have been made among theregional us?s of the Greek Revival or the Art Nouveau.There is, secondly, the matter of structure. The architect of today refuses to consider himself a mere confiseur employed to attach some trimmings within and withoutafter the structure has been delivered to him by the engineer. No, the architect himselfmust conceive it [the edifice] as an integrated whole, 38 This is, of course, the primecharge against the nineteenth century: the Great Divide. It is also a grossly overdrawnsimplicism that distorts the accomplishment of both centuries. The nineteenth-centurydivorce of structure from design was by no means as final as Giedion painted it for hisown purposes. This is a big subject, obviously outside the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to demonstrate that nineteenth-century architects were quiteaware of the new technology and availed themselves of it when it suited theirintentions; their clothing of it in traditional curtains had to do with a critique of formthat should be as closely heeded by the historian of the modern period as are the declarations of Le Corbusier and Gropius. The engineers, on the other side of the coin, werenot always content with exploring the naked prospects of their technology but oftenaspired to historically valid form. We need only point out the efforts of JamesBogardus, an obscure inventor canonized by Giedion, to style his cast-iron fronts andrender them architecturally respectable. And if the schism is exaggerated for the nineteenth century, the wholeness of the twentieth is not itself a clear-cut case. There ismuch informed sentiment for considering such designers as Pier Luigi Nervi, Buckminster Fuller, and Felix Candela to be structural engineers more than architects; and


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THE MARK OF SIGFRIED GIEDION 201the structural inadequacies of some modern buildings designed by well-known architects are notorious.

There is, finally, the red herring of morality. The modern architect, like the scientist, is supposed to feel responsible for the consequences of his imagination. Thearchitect of today regards himself not merely as the builder of an edifice, but also abuilder of contemporary life. 39Well, so did Pugin. Actually, the notion of the architect as reformer of society is not only much older than theModern Movement, but bynow it is also in partial disrepute. To a younger generation of professionals today it isdistasteful to think of the architect as form-giver. Giedion's claim that the architect,like all real artists, has to realize in advance the emotional needs of his fellow citizensbefore they themselves are aware of them 40 reveals the kind of low opinion for theclient that sounds reactionary in this age of community projects and participatorydesign. It is, in fact, a major contradiction both of the International Style and of its historian laureate that the populism of its aims is apparently achieved with consummatelyelitist means. The true architecture of an age is supposed to spring, in Giedionesquethought, from an inner energy, the innermost depths of society. This has the call ofdemocracy about it, and Giedion's respect for everyday things and anonymous masters would seem to sustain such a reading. But soon grass-roots sentiment is overpowered by his extravagant reverence for the architect as hero. The people, it turnsout, are ignorant of their own inner resources. They are easily fooled, as they were inthe nineteenth century when they followed the ruling taste of the rich, of governmentofficials, and of the artistic establishment that was willing to pander to this upper crust.The people are enjoined to obey instead the truly great, who are apparently selfappointed and self-anointed. In the words of Baudelaire quoted approvingly by Giedion, these are individuals of whom each . . .has a banner to his crown and the wordsinscribed on that banner are clear for all the world to read. Not one of their numberhas doubts of his monarchy and it is in this unshakeable conviction that their gloryresides. 41

These and similar criticisms of Space, Time and Architecture may already constitute flogging a dead horse. The contentions of modernist dogma have become a littleblurred in time, and will, in a while longer, doubtless blend with the rest of modernhistory. We have slowly been born to the truth that the history of nineteenth-centuryarchitecture cannot be written without the revivals, or the history of the twentieth century without the other international style of the twenties and thirties that shaped Berlinand Moscow, Rome, Madrid, andWashington. The present, Giedion himself wrotetoward the end of his life, is coming to be seen more and more as a mere link betweenyesterday and tomorrow. 42 The present always does.In the end, the main ingredient of Giedion's vast popularity, his spirited defense oftheModern Movement, may prove of minor consequence for his standing as a historian. It is very likely that we shall remember him for the nature of his search, ratherthan for its specific content or its willfulness. That search is bound up with Giedion'sspecial brand of humanism, a basic, hard-core belief in the stability of the humanframe as against the unremitting changeableness of the environment, natural and man

made, that contains its activities.


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202 SPIRO KOSTOFThere is [as he puts it] no static equilibrium between man and his environment, between innerand outer reality. We cannot prove in a direct way how action and reaction operate here. Wecan no more

lay tangible holdon these processes than

we cangrasp the nucleus of

an atom. Wesimply experience them by means of the several ways in which they crystallize.43

That has been Giedion's abiding worth, to chart the intangible estate betweeninner and outer reality. In the earlier phase of his work, he sought to understand theimpact of the machine upon our unchanging humanity, what happened when industrial production came up against our traditional ways of building and the organic processes that sustain life?the growing of crops, the making of bread, the slaughtering ofanimals. InMechanization Takes Command, the two aspects of Giedion's genius,when relieved of polemics, are evident: meticulous, imaginative research, on the onehand, and the ability to generalize from it on the unfading questions of life and death,on the other. It is a surprising experience to read in a scholarly book culminatingremarks such as these that end the chapter on the mechanization of agriculture.Can what is taking place in the farmer be a projection of something that is going on throughout? Does the transformation into wandering unemployment of people who for centuries hadtilled the soil correspond towhat is happening in each of us? In this process, has movement, thebasic concept of our world-image, been transposed, in distorted form, into human destiny? During and after the Second World War the violent uprooting of millions has become a coolly

accepted practice.44

And again, a masterful account of the development of mechanized meat production,from the slaughterhouse of La Villette to Gustavus F. Swift's refrigerated car, isbrought to a close with these observations:

How far the question is justified we do not know, nevertheless, itmay be asked: Has this neutrality toward death had any further effect upon us? . . .This neutrality toward death may belodged deep in the roots of our time. It did not bare itself on a large scale until theWar, when

whole populations, as defenseless as the animals hooked head downwards on the travelingchain, were obliterated with trained neutrality.45

It is this Giedion, not embarrassed to ask answer less questions of his finite research,whom we see again in the diptych of the Eternal Present.46 He turns now from theconfrontation of man and the machine to that much earlier and elemental confrontation of man and nature, the very first steps of the reordering of the natural environment he has been born to. In setting out to put our imprint upon the face of theearth, Giedion wants to know, what fears and hopes did we wish to immortalize, howdid we come to coordinate our social space? The scope of this query is so vast, the

material relics so chary of yielding up their secrets, that specialists in half a dozen fieldsselectively tapped by Giedion in the course of his discussion can readily find fault withthis or that remark, this or that instance of historical license. I submit that we shouldnot read the Eternal Present for a careful assessment of present-day research on prehistory and the early high cultures, any more than we read Henry Adams' MontSaint-Michel and Chartres today for its scholarly accuracy. Giedion comes through, in


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THE MARK OF SIGFRIED GIEDION 203these final books, as what he wanted to be all along, a philosopher of human things andplaces, who started by trying to understand and justify his own immediate time andended up in the dark, deep recesses of Pech-Merle and Altamira and Lascaux to showus where it all began.

ReferencesNB. For a complete bibliography of S. Giedion and biographical information, the reader is referred toHommage ? Giedion, Profile seiner Pers?nlichkeit(Basel and Stuttgart, 1971).

architecture and the Phenomena of Transition (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) p. 1.Hbid.3Mechanization Takes Command (Oxford and New York, 1948), p. 336.

Phenomena of Transition, p. 1.Hbid.6Ihid.1The Beginnings of Art, p. 6.

Mechanization, p. v.Mechanization, p. 3.

^Mechanization, p. 10.uSpace, Time and Architecture (1st edition, 1941), p. v. All further references are to this edition.l2Space, Time and Architecture, p. 18.

Ârchitecture, You and Me, pp. 3,6.l4Space, Time and Architecture, p. 19.

Ârchitecture, You and Me, p. 103.l6Space, Time and Architecture, p. 6.11Ibid.l*Space, Time and Architecture, pp. 5-6.19Architecture, You and Me, p. 19.

^Mechanization, p. 2.2lSpace, Time and Architecture, p. 4.22P. Frankl, Principles of Architectural History, The Four Phases of Architectural Style 1420-1900,

trans. J. F. O'Gorman (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 194.^Principles, p. 195.24Ibid.25Towards aNew Architecture (London and New York, 1946), trans. F. Etchells, pp. 2 7, 3 7.26Towards aNew A rchitecture ,p. 188.Architectural Review, July, 1968, p. 71.2%Space, Time and Architecture, p. 20.29lbid.30Architecture, You and Me, p. 11.31Architecture, You and Me, p. 4.32Mechanization, p. 353.33Architecture, You and Me, p. v.3ASpace, Time and Architecture, p. 5.

Ârchitecture, You and Me, p. 138.36P. Johnson, Karl Friedrich Schinkel im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Schriftenreihe des Architektenund Ingenieur-Vereins zu Berlin, 13 [19611).31Architecture, You and Me, p. 145.3fArchitecture, You and Me, p. 139.39Ibid.40Ihid.


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204 SPIROKOSTOF41Architecture, You and Me, p. 18.42The Beginnings of Art, p. xix.A3The

Beginnings of Art, pp.xviii-xix.

Mechanization, p. 168.^Mechanization, p. 246.46For a sympathetic appreciation of the two volumes, see J. Rykwert, Giedion and Prehistoric Art,

The Listener, 78 (1967), 494-96.

kostof,s themarkofsiegfriedgiedion

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