41and that also stressed dynamics, focusing on the movement of objects and at-
tempting to depict it in painting.
The interplay between these factors—the constructional and the artistic—
opened the way for a new awareness of space in modern architecture. Buildings
were no longer visually rooted in the ground but seemed to float above it while their
different volumes interpenetrate each other instead of simply being juxtaposed.
These features together with a plentiful use of glass—a material that according to
the author was primarily used because of its dematerializing qualities and which had
the effect of making interior and exterior space appear to interpenetrate—led to an
“unprecedented many-sidedness,” creating the sense of a movement in space that
seems, if but for an instant, to be frozen.^42 Giedion had identified this frozen move-
ment earlier in the stairwell of Gropius’s factory building at the Werkbund exhibition
in Cologne in 1914, but it was the Bauhaus in Dessau, also by Gropius and dating
from 1926, that he discussed as the example par excellence of this new concept of
space.
The new concept of space in modern architecture therefore proclaims and af-
firms time as a fourth dimension in a way that was quite unprecedented. The expe-
rience suggested by this architecture has a space-time character: it is not determined
by the static qualities of a fixed space but by an uninterrupted play of simultaneous
experiences of varying (spatial) character—experiences that, traditionally speaking,
could only be perceived one after the other. The typical features of modern architec-
ture, then, are simultaneity, dynamism, transparency, and many-sidedness; it is a
play of interpenetration and a suggestive flexibility.
In his conclusion Giedion emphasizes the importance of organic and irrational
elements in architecture, which in his view run the risk of being suppressed as a re-
sult of too great an emphasis on rationality. Architecture is faced with the task of
achieving a balance between the rational and geometric on the one hand and the or-
ganic and irrational on the other—between the domain of thought and that of feel-
ing. “The outstanding task of our period [is] to humanize—that is to reabsorb
emotionally—what has been created by the spirit. All talk about organizing and plan-
ning is in vain unless we first create again the whole man, unfractured in his meth-
ods of thinking and feeling.”^43 In Space, Time and ArchitectureGiedion thus built up
a case for the thesis that modern architecture, as a legitimate heir to the most rele-
vant architectural trends of the past, is capable of contributing to bridging the gap be-
tween thought and feeling because it relies upon the concept of space-time, just as
the sciences and the arts do. The whole aim of Space, Time and Architecturewas
thus to canonize modern architecture as a “new tradition.”
Space, Time and Architectureis not a pioneering text in the strict sense of the
word: the book does not break new ground or announce a completely new paradigm.
A number of elements of this paradigm had been around for some time already: the
moral appeal (Morris, Loos); the concept of space-time and its application in archi-
tecture (van Doesburg, Lissitzky); the relating of new materials and construction40