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Siegfried Giedion, Modernism and American Material Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Douglas Tallack
Douglas Tallack
Affiliation:
Douglas Tallack is Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, England. This essay is the 1994 winner of the Arthur Miller Prize awarded annually by the Arthur Miller Centre of the University of East Anglia for the best article by a UK citizen. The author acknowledges the aid of the University of Nottingham's Research Fund and of participants at seminars at which this paper has been given.
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Extract

The Swiss architectural critic and historian of technology, Siegfried Giedion, was born in 1893 and died in 1968. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941) and Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948) are his two most well-known books and both came out of time spent in the United States between 1938 and 1945. World War Two kept Giedion in America though he, unlike many other German-speaking European intellectuals, came home and in 1946 took up a teaching position at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich where he later became professor of art history. While in the United States he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1938–39), saw them in print as Space, Time and Architecture, and also completed most of the research in industrial archives and patent offices for Mechanization Takes Command. These two books are an important but, for the past twenty years, a mostly neglected, analysis of American material culture by a European intellectual, whose interests in Modernism included painting — notably Cubism and Constructivism — as well as architecture and planning. The period which saw the publication of Giedion's key works is, itself, an overlooked phase in the trans-Atlantic relationship between Modernism and modernization.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , August 1994 , pp. 149 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Although the comparison will not be systematically pursued here, Giedion is an interesting European counterpart to his contemporary, Lewis Mumford, whose work falls loosely into similar categories: architecture, urban form and technological change.

2 Giedion, Siegfried, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th rev. edn. (1941; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 2Google Scholar. Subsequent references are to this edition, and are cited parenthetically in the text.

3 Molinaro, Matie, McLuhan, Corinne and Toye, William, eds., Letters of Marshall McLuhan (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), 135–36 and 136Google Scholar. My thanks to Dick Ellis, who brought this reference to my attention.

4 Steam, Gerald E., ed., McLuhan Hot and Cool (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 304Google Scholar.

5 Kuhns, William, The Post-Industrial Prophets: Interpretations of Technology (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1971), 65Google Scholar. Subsequent references are to this edition, and are cited parenthetically in the text.

6 Berman, Marshall, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), 169Google Scholar.

7 For a later version of this argument, see Banham, Reyner, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

8 Giedion, Siegfried, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Norton, 1969), 187Google Scholar. Subsequent references are to this edition, and are cited parenthetically in the text.

9 Mumford, Lewis, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 177Google Scholar.

10 See Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), ch. 4Google Scholar, and Tallack, Douglas, Twentieth-Century America: The Intellectual and Cultural Context (London: Longman, 1991), ch. 3Google Scholar.

11 See King, Richard, “Modernism and Mass Culture: The Origins of the Debate”, in Ickstadt, Heinz, Kroes, Rob and Lee, Brian, eds., The Thirties: Politics and Culture in a Time of Broken Dreams (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1987), 120–42Google Scholar.

12 Zucker, Paul, ed., New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, n.d.), xv–xivGoogle Scholar. Subsequent references are to this edition, and are cited parenthetically in the text.

13 Frampton, Kenneth, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, rev. edn. (London:Thames and Hudson, 1985), 210Google Scholar. Subsequent references are to this edition, and are cited parenthetically in the text.

14 Wolfe, Tom, From Bauhaus to Our House (London: Abacus, 1983), 4Google Scholar.

15 Mumford, Lewis, The Highway and the City (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1964), 156Google Scholar.

16 The Letters of Lewis Mumford and Frederic J. Osborn: A Transatlantic Dialogue, 1938–70, ed., Hughes, Michael R. (Bath: Adams and Dart, 1971), 34Google Scholar.

17 My thanks to James Tallack, who brought this interesting piece of construction work to my attention.