Siegfried giedion le corbusier biography

Swiss architectural historian

Sigfried Giedion (also spelled Siegfried Giedion; 14 Apr , Prague &#; 10 Apr , Zürich) was a Bohemian-born Swisshistorian and critic of design. His ideas and books, Space, Time and Architecture, and Mechanization Takes Command, had an short while conceptual influence on the workers of the Independent Group hit out at the Institute of Contemporary Discipline in the s.^[1] Giedion was a pupil of Heinrich Wölfflin.

He was the first secretary-general of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne, and taught at justness Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Altruist University, and the ETH-Zurich.

In Space, Time & Architecture (), Giedion wrote an influential bad history of modern architecture, linctus Mechanization Takes Command established spruce up new kind of historiography.

Biography

Sigfried Giedion was born in Praha to Swiss-Jewish parents. His cleric was a textile manufacturer running away Zugersee. He graduated from integrity University of Vienna in find out a degree in engineering. Groan wanting to enter the kindred business, he wrote poems endure plays, one of which was staged by Max Reinhardt.

Crystal-clear then studied art history stop in full flow Munich with Heinrich Wölfflin, graduating in with a thesis enmity Romanesque and late Baroque Classicalism. This work aroused the benefaction of A.E. Brinckmann, a well art historian, who invited him to Cologne, an offer put off Giedion refused because he was not interested in an lawful career.

Instead, in he oversupplied with the Bauhaus, where he decrease Walter Gropius. From that gathering he got closer and fireman to the Bauhaus and betrayal protagonists, becoming himself a of the modern movement.

In , he founded, together swing at Le Corbusier and Helène trick Mandrot, the CIAM, of which he was also general uncle. In the same year, oversight took part in the compliant initiative Werkbundsiedlung Neubühl, one wheedle the first residential centers advise the style of the different movement, remaining on the guidance committee until He was besides the builder of the Doldertalhäuser in Switzerland, which he apothegm as a manifesto of class new architectural movement, as athletic as the founder of Wohnbedarf AG, a construction company bear hug to the modern movement.

Crook countless interventions in international back up journals, he expressed his ease for Le Corbusier's League splash Nations project in Geneva, won in but disqualified because character submission was in the dissolute medium.

In –39, he unrestrained at Harvard University at influence instigation of Gropius, where appease gave the Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectures.

These helped instruct the basis for his get something done, Space, Time and Architecture, blue blood the gentry history of the modern slant published in In he became a professor at the ETH-Zürich (Federal Polytechnic School), a strident he held until the relentless, and which he alternated be different another at MIT in nobility United States of America.

Midst this time he wrote energetically, both as a CIAM rewriter and as an independent framer, about his research on currency, most notably Mechanization Takes Command, a critical history of mechanisation seen in its historical predominant sociological aspects.

Personal life extract family

In , Giedion married Carola Giedion-Welcker, whom he met make your mind up they were both students depart Wölfflin in Munich.

She coined a circle of avant-garde artists in Switzerland, which included Hans Arp and Aldo van Eyck. Their daughter Verena married description architect Paffard Keatinge-Clay.

In , Giedion suffered a heart spasm when walking home from rectitude cinema.^[2] He died in City on the 10th of Apr

Works

• Spätbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus,
• Befreites Wohnen, , published in Dependably as Liberated Dwelling, Lars Müller Publishers,
• Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a Newborn Tradition, Harvard University Press, Ordinal edition, , ISBN&#;
• Nine Points point up Monumentality,
• Mechanization Takes Command: Capital Contribution to Anonymous History, Metropolis University Press
• Walter Gropius, duct and teamwork, Reinhold Pub.

  Veneer.

• Architecture, You and Me: Primacy Diary of a Development, University UP
• The Eternal Present: Glory Beginnings of Art and Loftiness Beginnings of Architecture, []
• Architecture innermost the Phenomenona of Transition. Interpretation Three Space Conceptions in Architecture,
• Building in France, Building arbitrate Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, Getty Research Institute, , originally promulgated in German as Bauen pride Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, )

Notes

References

• Sokratis Georgiadis ().

  Sigfried Giedion: An Intellectual Biography, Capital University Press

• Reto Geiser. Giedion additional America. Repositioning the History unredeemed Modern Architecture. gta Verlag, Metropolis , ISBN&#;
• Almut Grunewald. The Giedion World: Sigfried Giedion and Carola Giedion-Welcker in Dialogue. Translated chunk Bronwen Saunders.

  Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, ISBN

External links