Giedion, Sigfried [occasionally misspelled as "Siegfried"]

Date born: 1888 [NYT says 1893]

Place born: Prague, Czechoslovakia [NYT says Swiss canton of Aargau]

Date died: 1968

Place died: Zurich, Switzerland

Architectural historian; German Neo-Classicism. Giedion was born to Johann and Bertha Jacobs Giedion. He received his Ph.D. in art history under Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. Giedion was appointed professor at the university in Zurich. He left Switzerland shortly before World War II to be the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry in 1938. His Norton lectures for 1938-1939 became his most famous book, Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition. He married fellow Wölfflin student Carola Weckler, who under her married name Giedion-Weckler, also published on modern architecture. Giedion was appointed professor at Harvard University in 1938. He returned to Europe to head of the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich in 1947. The following year his Mechanization Takes Command appeared. In 1951 he returned to the United States to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His biography of Gropius appeared in 1954. Giedion returned to Harvard as a visiting professor from 1954-1956. In 1957 he delivered the A. W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In 1962 Giedion published his Bollingen lectures. His Mellon lectures were published in 1964 as Eternal Present.

Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command was criticized by Pierre Francastel in Francastel's Art et Technique, 1956, accusing him of among other things, idealism. He doubted Giedion's contention that the Crystal Palace and balloon-frame architecture in America were the seeds of modernist architecture.

Home Country: Czech/Switzerland/United States

Sources: Rykwert, Joseph. "Siegfried [sic] Giedion and the Notion of Style." Burlington Magazine 96, no. 613 (April 1954): 123-124; Hommage à Giedion: Profile seiner Persönlichkeit. Schriften und Dokumente von Sigfried Giedion sowie Beiträge der Freunde. Basel: Stuttgart, Birkhäuser, 1971; Hommage à Giedion, seines Persönlichkeit. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1971; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 40, 51 mentioned; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 46; Wölfflin, Heinrich. Heinrich Wölfflin, 1864-1945: Autobiographie, Tagebücher und Briefe. Joseph Ganter, ed. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1982, p. 491; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l'histoire de l'art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 198; Georgiadis, Sokratis. Sigfried Giedion: an Intellectual Biography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 117-119; [obituary:] "Sigfried Giedion, Historian, 74, Dies, Architecture Theorist Was Professor at Harvard." New York Times April 12, 1968, p. 35.

Bibliography: [collected writings, Italian:] Siegfried [sic] Giedion: scritti di architettura 1928-1968: antologia critica. Palermo: D. Flaccovio, 2000; Bauen in Frankreich: Eisen und Eisenbeton. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928; Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941; Spätbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus. Munich: F. Brückmann, 1922; Walter Gropius. Paris: G. Crès & cie, 1932.

Subject's name: Sigfried Giedion; Siegfried Giedion [incorrect]