Word: giedion
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Brainchild of Switzerland's 55-year-old Professor Giedion-whose Space, Time and Architecture (1941) was a notable technical study-Mechanization Takes Command takes a tremendous stab at measuring the changeable human animal against the tools and technical appliances which have been associated with him from the early records of history to the present day. Professor Giedion holds that "the sun is mirrored even in a coffee spoon," looks for the truth about man in "humble things," and finds Hitler and Napoleon no more instructive than Linus Yale (locks), Clarence Birdseye (frozen food) and Sylvester Graham (bread...
Daily life, says Professor Giedion, has always been a series of movements set in space. The ancient Greek falsely saw the world as the "immovable center of the cosmos," and his classical temples were expressive of eternal equilibrium. Medieval man saw the world as something set in motion by the hand of God; he found peace in rooms whose lack of furniture ("movables") gave spacious tranquillity to his austere thoughts. His dinner table was set up on a trestle, promptly removed when he had eaten. Since that time, man has come to abhor the vacuum of space: he still talks...
Professor Giedion is not the sort of crank who advocates a return to 100% manual labor. But he believes that if man cannot protect himself from the emotionless "collectivism" of the machine, "future generations will perhaps designate this period as one of mechanized barbarism, the most repulsive barbarism...
...Finest study to date of the Chicago school is included in the monumental book, Space, Time & Architecture by Swiss-born Architectural Critic Sigfried Giedion, which has just reached its third printing (Harvard University Press; $5). Giedion finds the roots of the Jenney and Sullivan skyscraper, not in the showpieces of past European and U.S. architecture, but in such useful and noble feats of engineering as glass-surfaced markets and department stores, or the cast-iron-pillared warehouses of the St. Louis water front...
...examples of towns Dr. Giedion used Paris, Bath, Nancy, and Versailles. "The importance of Versailles doesn't lie in its royal splendor but in its clear approach to the problem of human living," he said...