Word: giedion
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MARSHALL McLUHAN, Canadian communications philosopher: The late Siegfried Giedion, Swiss art historian and author of Mechanization Takes Command (1948). He was a student of formal structures in the man-made world and instituted the study of forms in everyday life. His book is a study of the death wish in modern man, with specific application to the mechanization of bread baking and meat packing. His most exciting moment was his discovery of the American barber chair...
...Eating Machine Sack artfully enlarges his vision of the System as Superscapegoat for the Superstate. Basically the book consists of profiles of four Viet Nam veterans. But it is also a metaphor that has been duly certified by such thinkers as Marx, Veblen, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion (Mechanization Takes Command). The theme is familiar, though no less enticing for having been subject to countless cliches. The oversimplified version goes like this: As technological systems grow more complex, individuals grow less responsible for controlling the consequences...
...tone tends to be annoying rather than actually offensive. It does, however, become incredibly pompous in Siegfried Giedion's article on "Continuity and Change in the Vocation of the Architect" when Giedion quotes himself three times...
...Even in Giedion's article, tone is not the main problem. Connection has a laudable aim, but it needs more informative writing and much tighter editing...
...Architecture provides the corporal and psychic shelter of the man of today," Giedion declared. But the straight-line styles of Bay-Ridge and split-level architecture are inadequate expressions of "the many-sided nature of man's inner life." These styles, he continued, represent a tendency to escape doubt and uncertainty by attaching oneself to superficialities without solving basic problems...