Modernism: Giedion and Banham

Sigfried Giedion and Reyner Banham are two giants in the fields of architecture history, specifically Modernism. Space, Time and Architecture: Growth of a New Tradition was originally written in 1941 but has undergone five revisions, the last in 1977. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age was written in 1960, and has a second edition, released in 1980. Banham studied under both Giedion and Pevsner, and took many of their theories, cut across them, and linked them to his own. Most notably, Banham links Modernism to built structures in which Giedion (and other scholars) would call Functionalist, and instead traces and subjects them to their historical traditions, which are often symbolic, non-Functionalist, and directly evolve and sometimes copy other architectural traditions. Banham believes that by the middle of the 1930s, the word “Functionalism” became used as a comprehensive term for the progressive architecture of the 1920s (properly called the International Style) and its “canon of approved forerunners had been set up by Giedion. “ (320) Banham disapproves of the term, and its respective ideas as a label for this period, because as he says, “it is doubtful that the ideas implicit in Functionalism were ever significantly present in the minds of any influential architects of the period.” (320) He argues that although the architecture of the 1920s is capable of austerity and nobility, it is also heavily loaded with symbolic meanings, often ones that were ignored or thrown away by scholars beginning in the 1930s. For example, the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exhibition in 1929 by Mies is purely symbolic in intention. Even more so, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy, despite being able to break the building down functionally, revolves around an “ideal-terrain” symbolism. Banham argues that by ignoring the inherent symbolism and confluence with other architectural traditions, scholars were failing to acknowledge the architectural world’s exchange of ideas and conflicts between people, movements, and polemics of that particular era. His method, therefore, revolves around a core of main ideas evolving at the time, including the Academic tradition of Rationalism and Elementarism, Futurism, De Stijl, Le Corbusier, and the Bauhaus. In each of these chapters, his deconstruction of particular buildings is circumscribed by a full-blown and deep discussion of the historically artistic roots, conflicts, and developments related to the idea or school of thought. The construction of the building cannot be isolated from its process of thought and creation.

Giedion also departs from explaining architecture history from a panoramic survey but instead chooses several events or buildings to isolate and examine intensely, giving us a ‘close read’ of various points in the architecture timeline. He has an integrated synthesis between the cultural context of modern architecture and urban planning, and develops this through a look at space-time conceptions, most notably the shift from the Renaissance to Modernism. The space-time conception he refers to is the way volumes are placed in space and relate to one another and the way interior space is separated from exterior space or interpenetrates it. He believes the space-time conception of a particular era is a universal attribute. (xxvii ) He identifies three stages of space-time conceptions. The first stage was brought into being by the interplay between volumes (in cultures such as Egypt, Sumer, Greece) while interior space was disregarded. The second stage began in the midst of the Roman Empire, when interior space and with it, the vaulting problem, became the highest aim of architecture (as seen in the Pantheon) and the formation of interior space became synonymous with hollowed-out interior space. This stage continues to the end of the 18th century. The 19th century forms an intermediary link and the third conception begins in the early 20th century, with the optical revolution that abolished the single-form perspective that began during the Renaissance. Free-standing buildings are appreciated as they approach sculpture, there is an occupation with interior space as hollowed-out space, and the vaulting problem has incorporated movement into its equation. Ultimately, each of these periods are dominated by either transitory (non-lasting, fleeting, fad) or constituent (lasting, reproduced, repeating) facts.

Banham’s method, unlike Giedion, uses the specific tradition of Futurism as a departure point for the Modern movement as well as: a sense of architect’s responsibility to the society in which he finds himself (Pugin, Ruskin, Morris, Deutscher Werkbund), a Rationalist (Structuralist) approach to architecture ( Willis, Violet-de-Duc, Choisy, Semper), a tradition of academic instruction (Ecole des Beaux Arts , Guadet) in which many academic ideas came not from scholarly work but from painting. Essentially, he bases Modernism on legitimate movements and happenings in architecture, not in a space-time, crossed section way, but as a compilation of many academic theories. Perhaps the best two comparison that illustrate the authors’ respective methods are on the discussion of Futurism/Cubism/Sant’Elia and on the Bauhaus/Gropius. Both of these movements are considered departure points and innovations for Modernism, but both movements are treated radically different by the authors.


Futurism/Cubism/Sant'Elia

Giedion regards Futurism and Cubism as two interlinked developments that were reflections of a changing space-time conception. He begins with a discussion of the physical sciences in the early 20th century, which he argues changed the notion of time. Previously, time was regarded in such terms of: realistically, as something going on and existing without an observer or subjectively, as something having no existence apart from the observer. Developments in the physical sciences created a new way of regarding time: space and time as a union. Futurism and Cubism, for Giedion, are chock full of inherent constituent facts, and tried to enlarge our optical vision by introducing the new unit of space-time into the language of art. Cubism deals with changes in spatial representation, and futurists deal with researching changes in movement.

For Giedion, the Futurists, such as Marinetti and Boccioni, reacted against the ‘quietness’ in Italy, according to the author they felt ashamed Italy was a considered a refuge for those who sought to escape the realities of the present (industrialization and transportation). Marinetti, in his Manifesto, put forth the importance of speed, and in the Second Technical Manifesto, argues that objects in motion multiply and distort themselves, just as do vibrations, which indeed they are, in passing through space. Therefore, the artistic productions of this movement are based on representation of movement and its correlates: interpenetration and simultaneity. The painter and sculptor Boccioni tried to circumscribe the sense of a new plasticity, which conceived objects in a perpetual state of movement, as they exist in the real world. His sculpture, ‘Bottle Evolving in Space’ reflected this, especially through its use of intersecting spatial planes. This also reveals the fascination with treating an object of daily use with a new artistic invention. This sculpture, Giedion argues, is the best example of Cubist and Futurist works being closely bound together on the basis of the same spatial conception.
While Futurists present movement as subject matter, or show objects and bodies in motion, research into movement, Cubists were more passive and less vocal in their expression. Giedion argues that they were purely men in their research work, not fighters for a country or cause. The Cubists did not try to paint movement in itself or the dynamics of muscles, or the automobile but rather represented their obsession with multiple perspectives through still life and things of daily use.

Giedion briefly touches on the Citta Nuova as it being a project that tried to introduce the futuristic love of movement as an artistic element in the contemporary city. He argues what is more important is that Sant’Elia’s drawings expressed trends that were first implemented in the 1960s when movement in cities came to be recognized as a problem of urban form, creating the need for different levels for pedestrians and vehicles. He also argues that Antonio Sant’Elia demanded elasticity and lightness in his architecture, using concrete and materials made by new chemicals and technological innovations.

Giedion spends far more time discussing Cubism, which he argues was a reaction that argued painters’ means of expression had lost contact with modern life. In Paris, in Cubism, these efforts first attained a visible result. The methods of painting spatial relationships which Cubists developed led up to the form giving principles of the new space conception. He delves into this new space conception with a discussion based in the Renaissance.

From the Renaissance to first decade of the 20th century, perspective had been a constituent fact in painting. Seeing the world through the Renaissance order, in terms of three dimensions, had penetrated and rooted itself deeply in the human mind, for a long time no other form of perception could be imagined. But space in the modern world, is conceived as many-sidedness with infinite potentially for relationships in and around it. Giedion argues that in order to grasp true space, the observer must project himself through it. (An example is viewing the stairways in the Eiffel Tower). In modern physics, space is related to a moving, not fixed, point of reference, so in Cubism, this is reflected. The Cubists did not reproduce the appearance of objects from one vantage point, but often went around them. Since they view objects relatively, they see them at once from all sides, so added to the Renaissance three dimensional painting, another dimension is added- time. Cubists essentially dissect the object; they seek to extend the scale of optical vision. In architecture, new thinkers came out of this new ‘simultaneous’ way of thinking. Interpenetration, hovering, and penetration in architecture of this time are often understood in terms of spatial research, prisms, slabs and surfaces penetrate and dislodging against each other. Also the use of neo-plasticism, used by Mondrian, signifies a 3-dimensional volume reduced to the plane.

Banham finds the direct root of Modern architecture partially in the developments of Futurism, and thus spends a great deal of time discussing the intricacies involved in and around this tradition. Despite attempting to distance himself from Giedion’s notions of space-time conceptions, he does agree that the qualities which made Futurism a turning point in the development of Modern theories of design were indeed, ideological, and concerned more with attitudes of the mind rather than formal or technical models. He does say however, that these attitudes of mind were also often “vehicles in the transmission of formal and technical methods which were not, in the first place, of Futurist invention.” (99) Therefore, although the ideological standpoints are unique in creation of a Futurist school of thought, the methods and models for buildings were often and usually based on preceding models.

The Futurist Manifesto (published February 20th, 1909) written by the poet Marinetti, was not simply, as Giedion relates, a revolution against the ‘quietness’ of Italy but rather reflects a late and intense change in northern Italy that was already reflected much of Europe. Northern Italy was one of the last of the West to shift from princely, yet urbane duchies into subsidiaries of a revived mega city (in this case Rome), as well as transforming into industrial centers. The existing aristocracy and common people found their social foundations, existing since the Renaissance, drastically altered. The radical, almost overnight change to a technological society provoked almost all Futurist ideology. With the advent of technology, not only did it invade the everyday street, with the car, tram, and train, but it also allowed the poet, painter, writer, and sculptor to no longer be a “passive recipient of technological experience, but to experience it himself” (102). Much of the imagery relayed in the Futurist Manifesto was derived from 19th century sources (such as the locomotive, borrowed from Whitman) there were some new elements added, such as the airplane. But Marinetti’s attitude was that of a poet, “adopted for the benefit of other poets” (106) but we do see some connections to architecture. For example, the idea of the City of Tomorrow was already in circulation by 1909, and furthered when the Futurists met and aligned with painters and sculptors in 1910. While these new ideas where in part due to the works of Marinetti, they were also indebted to developments in painting in the School of Paris.

With the Technical Manifesto of April 1910 by Boccioni, the dynamic was emphasized over the static, the deformation and multiplication of visual images were stressed, art based upon conventions and truths became expendable, space being visually just one of these conventions. (107) Early Futurist painting took a lot from the Impressionist School and this link is significant as being part of an anti-academic tradition that Futurists would pass onto Modern Movement theory. In 1911, the Futurists went to Paris and met the Cubists. Banham finds this interesting because it is the same year in which the Cubists formalized fragments of representational painting by “splintering down into a shallow layer of space whose depth is indicated without recourse to academic perspective.” (109) This would come to be a large difference that Banham would emphasize in Cubist versus Futurist art.

For Banham, Cubism was the natural end of a long reformist tradition running back from Cezanne towards Courbet. Its aesthetics were traditional and precisely academic, in no way revolutionary as those of Futurism because Cubism was a revolution in painting, not part of a “profound reorientation towards a changed world.” (110) Because of some resemblance in paintings, there has been a long-held belief that Futurism was derived from Cubism. While there was some influence on both ends, the two were separately evolved traditions, and do not reflect a universal attitude.

Boccioni’s best known sculptural work, Bottle Evolving in Space, derived from a sketch of the same name and type. The importance of the sketch and sculpture depends upon the rotation of the bottle in its own axis, while the viewer observes it from different heights. This resulted in a series of concave/convex forms, a powerful plastic sense of the bodies in rotation (which is an important departure from the flattening tendencies of Cubism at that time), and a unique treatment of a table-top. Picasso and Cezanne ignored the multiplication of table tops due to the changing viewpoint of their various respective objects, but in Boccioni’s bottle, the table is given full recognition. You can see three main table top planes defined are almost parallel to one another, and the boundaries cross and override one another at the corners. Banham argues that we get a spatial experience analogous to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie House.

In 1911, Marinetti published La Futurisme, which had three important outlines to theories of Modern design: opposition to handicraft, un-monumental architecture of democracy, and the power-station as apotheosis of technology. The opposition to handicraft goes back to Marinetti’s disdain for Ruskin’s pastoral imagery, the un-monumental architecture defines three main building types: large, well ventilated low-rental blocks, suburban villas sited for breeze and view, and halls of assembly. Not surprisingly, these were to be dominating architectural themes of Le Corbusier. Finally, the power station deals with a “smart, glittering, business like technological life which will haunt the next generation. “ (130)

After spending two chapters discussing Futurism, Banham relays the works of Antonio Sant’Elia as an artist/architecture within this tradition, specifically his drawings on the Citta Nuova. From 1912-1914, Sant’Elia made a number of imaginative drawings of buildings and town planning ideas which were exhibited in 1914. Alongside his drawings was a new Manifesto, not written by him and unsure as to whom it belonged to, relayed and anticipated the later anti-Functionalist mood of Le Corbusier and Gropius. Sant’Elia’s work generally manifests a rejection of the past, of monumentality and classicism. Banham outlines his three sets of increasing complex drawings in Citta Nuova, beginning with his simple and somewhat abstract exercises in architectonic form, which is sometimes given some functional justification. The shapes are bare and smooth, rectangular or semicircular, and there is an uninterrupted verticality. Although nothing like this was ever built, the monument to War-dead in Como did reflect some of these qualities. The second set of drawings represents single buildings for simple functions. These included all the buildings Marinetti outlined in La Futurisme and later used by Le Corbusier: villas open to the breeze, large apartment houses, great meeting halls, and others like airship hangars, bridges, factories, etc. Emphasis is on the same elements from the first set of sketches: “battered walls, canted buttresses, square podia or basements, and strong semi circular projections as either apses, or in ranks along the side of the building. There is vertical rhetoric in some, unassuming simplicity in others.” (132) The third set of drawings are the most complex, which are the plans for towns and cities. He uses loosely modeled curved masses which are held together by a basic unity of style and vision- he bases his city on a complex network of transportation services, in some drawings seven levels deep, out of a 3d grid rise the buildings, with floors stepped back one behind the other towards the top. Floors are of equal of even increasing depth from back to front, and the overhangs at the back are taken up by a rising curve of a parabolic arch, whose other half support the back of the buildings twin, with rooms for transport serves between them. Elevators are on the facades, and rising vertically, stand clear of upper floors to which they are connected by bridges of ever increasing length as one goes up. Ultimatly, the network of multi-level circulation resembles Boccionio’s “field” concept of space, with bodies connected by geometrical fields of force. (133)

Futurism eventually died with the deaths of Boccioni and Sant’Elia, by the First World War, by later being tied to fascism, but helped make progressive architecture possible. Even after 1918, Sant’Elia’s concept of the multi-level tower city held the imaginations of architects, up and beyond the 1960s, when Giedion argued Sant’Elia mattered most. For Banham, the theory and aesthetics of Modernism came directly from two traditions: Futurism and Academicism. He argues that the perfection of Modernism could only be achieved by shying away from Futurism and coming closer to the academic traditions of either Blanc or Guadet. The perfection of Modernism, usually attributed to the Barcelona Pavilion, could only have been achieved by being more academic; since “Futurism was dedicated to the ‘constant renovation of our architectonic environment’ precludes processes with definite terminations such as a process of perfection must be.” (327)


Expressionism/Gropius/Bauhaus

Perhaps, then, it is important to skip our comparison to the Bauhaus and Gropius. Giedion argues that after World War I, architecture was consumed by the applied arts. Within the industry, a state of widespread uncertainty prevailed, and found its home in the Expressionist movement. It reached its height in Germany in the post-war years. Giedion is explicit in his belief that the Expressionist movement could not perform any service for architecture, and yet wove its way into almost every German artist at the time. In essence, Expressionism is simply part of the progression of development of Functionalism of the Bauhaus. He believed that the Bauhaus emerged despite this infatuation with Expressionism. For him, the surviving ideals of the German Werkbund provided salvation and guidance, and the new school sought to “unite art and industrial life and find a keynote for contemporary architecture” (487). While Giedion concedes that the early works of the Bauhaus had some Expressionist traces, with the leader of the school, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus was able to escape it.

Giedion argues that Gropius was instinctively aware of the inadequacy of Expressionism and of the need to escape it. In order to do this, he began to recruit staff members from various abstractionist groups including Itten, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, and Schleemer. The next development to get away from Expressionism was to bring the Bauhaus into contact with more industry, and did so by moving from Weimar to Dessau. It was then that the Bauhaus became well known all over Europe.

Despite its various artists and architects that had an impact upon the school, as far as public opinion went, leaders of the Bauhaus had one artistic doctrine, which was detested by Expressionists, the conventional, and the academic. The school then came under attack by both the Left and Right wing. Giedion argues that in order to understand the Bauhaus, one had to understand the conception behind modern painting of the time. The Ecole Polytechnique was dedicated to fusing science and life and the Bauhaus under Gropius was dedicated to fusing art and industry, art and daily life, with architecture was the intermediary.
The actual construction of the Bauhaus had to meet many different requirements. It would house the Bauhaus, the school of design itself, then the school of the city of Dessau for continuation courses in the trades, and finally, it needed combination studio and dwelling quarters, assembly halls, dining rooms, and teacher’s homes had to be provided. The chief aim by Gropius was to produce a clear separation of each of these functions from the others, and not through isolation but by joining them together into interrelation as a single unit.

The school is enclosed by its famous glass curtains, the studio-dormitory section rises six stories in height, each room has a small balcony which is a concrete slab that juts out into space, and hovers close to the massive wall. This is what gives the building its exciting and singular punch. The dorms connect directly to the School of Design through a one-story wing, which is in turn connected to the Dessau school. For Giedion, two major endeavors of modern architecture are fulfilled with the Bauhaus: the hovering, vertical grouping of planes which satisfies a person’s feelings for a relational space, and there is extensive transparency that permits interior and exterior to been seen simultaneously (going back to Cubism and optic revolution) through a variety of levels and reference points.

Banham does not see the story of the Bauhaus as so cut and dry. For him, while the Bauhaus is now seen as the symbol of Modernity, it has many roots in the past and a tumultuous and ever-changing and evolving history. The Bauhaus was formed in 191 by the fusion two schools: the Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar and by the Kunstgewerbe School founded by Henry van de Welde after he came to Weimar in 1903. From both institutions, Gropius inherited a slew of buildings, a few members, and the ideas associated with the two. Banham argues that while Gropius’s action of fusing two schools was a pioneer gesture, it was not an original idea. This cross-over of disciplines, professors, and ideas had been done many times in the past. However, the actual fusion was indeed new. Gropius recruited mostly painters from his connections with other institutions, in spite that the Bauhaus was to train in for all branches of design, and culminating in architecture. Despite recruiting painters from all Schools and thought, in the public mind, they were all Expressionists, which caused problems and alarm in the first place. Banham argues however, that the Bauhaus was constantly undergoing changes from its inception to its dissolution in 1933, due to changing thought in German architecture, art, and by the German public at large.

From the beginning, Gropius sought to recognize the nature of buildings as composites of architects, painters, and sculptors. This idea is certainly not unique and not very different from others such as Berlage before 1910. But Gropius’ early writing about the Bauhaus strikes as distinctly Expressionist when he says that craftsmanship, learning the crafts, and creating a guild of crafters could be the highest attainment for students at the Bauhaus. For someone who was grounded in the Werkbund, the office of Behrens, and in touch with Futurism, it is astonishing that he makes no reference to machinery, industry, and instead takes the standpoint of inspired craftsmanship. However, this was one of the strengths of Bauhaus because it inspired an un-academic method of “learning by doing”, an innovation in architectural education repeated to the modern day. The other innovation of the Bauhaus was to take each student, rid the person of all preconceived notions of design, and start their education from scratch. This method was considered radical, as the students studied medieval mystics, and Eastern spiritual discipline alongside traditional texts, alarming the citizens of Weimar even further. Later, Gropius saw his view of crafts as a buffer between “sensitive spirits, and the harsh realities of mechanized production”, it was also meant to prepare students for designing mass production. A student begins with the simplest tools and least complicated jobs, and works their way up, keeping in tune with entire process of production from start to finish.

It wasn’t until 1923 that documents outlining the true curriculum and manifesto of the Bauhaus appeared. In this time, the school was undergoing many changes, and also entering its greatest era. Gropius’s manifest gives reader’s a general overview of the history of design from a Werkbund perspective, he illustrates the failure of the academies (passed on from Futurism), the decay of folk art (passed from Ruskin and Morris), the isolation of the creative artist, the famine of industrial designers, and gives, as Banham calls it, “a self-satisfied estimate of Ruskin, Morris, van de Velde, Behrens, and the Werkbund.” (279) Gropius does not distinguish between different types of forms and shapes, but Moholy-Nagy does say in a document that the Bauhaus prefers the Phlebian solids, which this helped create and define the International style. For Gropius in this later stage, he says that the objective of all creative efforts comes from giving form to space through intuition, and even sometimes metaphysical powers. He has a clear insistence on the spiritual, and it is important for Banham to note that the Bauhaus did not have any functionalist phases until Hannes Meyer took over on Gropius’s retirement.

In 1923, the Bauhaus changes from an Expressionism standpoint to one of Elementarism. The Bauhaus did not teach certain subjects which were thought of as essential to the Machine Age architecture, but what they did teach echoed Futurism in its need to create a clear, organic architecture which was not weakly sentimental, overly aesthetic, or decorative. Although Gropius would not agree, after 1924, the products and buildings designed at the Bauhaus had a particular Bauhaus style, that is, “considerable unanimity, repertoire of Phlebian forms, space-grids, glossy synthetic finishes and tweedy natural tones, use of steel and glass and evolution of a basically de Stijl manner of typography.” (283)

As Giedion and Banham both argue, the Bauhaus was receiving criticism from both the Left and Right in Weimar, so nearly all students and teachers supported Gropius’s decision to move the school to Dessau. Their physical move also moved Bauhaus into a position of undisputed leadership. Opened in 1926, the architectural works, including the Bauhaus itself, was informed by “aesthetic determinations which match Gropius’s social and technical convictions” (288). The buildings itself, although have some traditional debts to the Picturesque, Constructivist, and Elementarist traditions, is like nothing else of the period due to its centrifugal organization. Another innovation is the mode of vision in which it should be seen- the aerial view. The 3D quality of planning is notable with the two stories of the school bridged across a road, a radical conception departing from corridor bridges of other buildings at the time. The central bridged section was not forced onto Gropius by landscape however, the decision to arrange the circulation and the buildings in a particular way was an almost abstract decision made on a symbolic “Ideal Terrain”. The road that divides the site also divides the buildings into two halves despite the bridge. On one side is the Bauhaus and the on the other side is the Fachschule of the city of Dessau, each with a separate entrance, suggesting an “arrogant barrier of snobbery between artist and craftsman.” (288) According to Banham, the Bauhaus is a masterpiece of New architecture, it exceeds in subtlety and originality.