Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

37

sensibility,^30 the second takes it up in

a more radical fashion. Here Giedion

opposes in an explicit manner tradi-

tional ideas such as attributing to the

house an eternal value. Instead he ar-

gues, “The house is a value of use. It

is to be written off and amortized

within a measurable time.”^31 This is

feasible, according to Giedion, when

building production is organized on

an industrial basis, so that building

costs and rents are reduced. Houses

should not look like fortresses; rather,

they should allow for a life that re-

quires plenty of light and wants

everything to be spacious and flex-

ible. Houses should be open; they

should reflect the contemporary

mentality that perceives all aspects

of life as interpenetrating: “Today we

need a house, that corresponds in

its entire structure to our bodily feel-

ing as it is influenced and liberated

through sports, gymnastics, and a

sensuous way of life: light, transparent, movable. Consequentially, this open house

also signifies a reflection of the contemporary mental condition: there are no longer

separate affairs, all domains interpenetrate.”^32 Giedion explicitly refers in this text to

Sant’Elia, whose idea it was that a house should only last one generation. In the man-

ifesto that Sant’Elia wrote with Marinetti in 1914 it is indeed stated:

We have lost the sense of the monumental, of the heavy, of the static;

we have enriched our sensibility by a taste of the light, the practical, the

ephemeral and the swift.... An architecture so conceived cannot give

birth to any three-dimensional or linear habit, because the fundamen-

tal characteristics of Futurist architecture will be obsolescence and tran-

sience. Houses will last less long than we. Each generation will have to

build its own city.^33

Nowhere else in Giedion’s work is this concept of deliberate transitoriness so

emphatically stated as in Befreites Wohnen, a book that in terms of its rhetorical

structure also has the character of a manifesto. Openness, lightness, and flexibility

are associated here with the other slogan words of the New Building: rationality,

36

“Architecture” according to

László Moholy-Nagy.

(Concluding illustration in

Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material

zu Architektur;photo:

Jan Kamman/Schiedam.)

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