Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

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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,

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“Architecture” according to
László Moholy-Nagy.
(Concluding illustration in
Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material
zu Architektur;photo:
Jan Kamman/Schiedam.)

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