Sigfried Giedion

Sigfried Giedion (14 April 1888, Prague – 10 April 1968, Zürich) (also spelled Siegfried Giedion) was a Bohemia-born Swiss historian and critic of architecture.

His ideas and books, "Space Time and Architecture", and "Mechanization Takes Command", had an important conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950's era.

He was the first secretary-general of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne. He has also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, where he became chairman of the Graduate School of Design.

He was a pupil of Heinrich Wölfflin, and he taught as professor of art history at Zurich University.

With "Space, Time & Architecture" Giedion wrote an influential standard history of modern architecture, "Mechanization Takes Command" established a new kind of historiography.

He married Carola Giedion-Welcker, who created a circle of vanguardist artists in Switzerland, which included architect Aldo van Eyck.

Literary Works

* "Spätbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus", 1922
* "Space, Time & Architecture: the growth of a new tradition", 1941 - Harvard University Press, 5th edition, 2003, ISBN 0674830407
* "Mechanization Takes Command: : a contribution to anonymous history", Oxford University Press 1948
*"Architecture, You and Me: The Diary of a Development", Harvard UP 1958
* "The Eternal Present", 1964
*"Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete", Getty Research Institute, 1995

econdary literature

* Sokratis Georgiadis: Sigfried Giedion : an intellectual biography - Edinburgh : Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1993

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