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 1950s 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. His daughter Verena married the architect Paffard Keatinge-Clay.

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

Secondary literature

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

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