TEXTS & DOCUMENTS A Series of the Getty Center Publication Programs The TEXTS & DOCUMENTS series offers to the student of art, architecture, and aesthetics neglected, forgotten, or unavailable writings in English translation. Edited according to modern standards of scholarship and framed by critical introduc­ tions and commentaries, these volumes gradually mine the past centuries for studies that retain their significance in our understanding of art and of the issues surrounding its pro­ duction, reception, and interpretation. Eminent scholars guide the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in the selection and publication of TEXTS & DOCUMENTS. Each volume acquaints readers with the broader cultural conditions at the genesis of the text and equips them with the needed apparatus for its study. Over time the series will greatly expand our horizon and deepen our understanding of critical thinking on art. Julia Bloomfield, Thomas F. Reese, Salvatore Settis, Editors Kurt W. Forster, Consultative Editor, TEXTS & DOCUMENTS The Getty Center Publication Programs This page intentionally left blank BUILDING IN FRANCE BUILDING IN IRON BUILDING IN FERRO- CONCRETE This page intentionally left blank Published by the Getty Center for the History of Art and the humanities BUILDING IN BUILDING IN BUILDING IN IRON BUILDING IN FERRO- CONCRETE SIGFRIED GIEDION TEXTS & DOCUMENTS INTRODUCTION BY SOKRATIS GEORGIADIS TRANSLATION BY J. DUNCAN BERRY THE GETTY CENTER PUBLICATION PROGRAMS Julia Bloomfield, Thomas F. Reese, Salvatore Settis, Editors Kurt W. Forster, Consultative Editor, TEXTS & DOCUMENTS TEXTS & DOCUMENTS Architecture Harry F. Mallgrave, Editor Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete Stanislaus von Moos, Editorial Consultant Verena Clay, Translation Consultant Lynne Kostman, Managing Editor Benedicte Gilman, Manuscript Editor Published by The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, CA 90401-1455 © 1995 by The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities All rights reserved. Published 1995 Printed in Canada 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 7654321 Cover: Bruce Mau Design (based on fig. 58, p. 145) Translated from Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton. 1st ed. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928. © Andres Giedion and Verena Clay Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is to be found on the last printed page of this book. Contents Preface ix Sokratis Georgiadis — Introduction i SIGFRIED GIEDION BUILDING IN FRANCE, BUILDING IN IRON, BUILDING IN FERROCONCRETE 79 INTRODUCTION 85-100 CONSTRUCTION 87 INDUSTRY 88 ARCHITECTURE? 90 CONSTRUCTOR AND ARCHITECT 94 CONSTRUCTORS 97 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 99 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN FRANCE 100 IRON 101-149 1800-1850 FIRST ATTEMPTS 103 FIRST FORMATION 110 1850-1890 EXPERIMENTAL ARCHITECTURE 120 EXHIBITIONS 120 EXHIBITIONS OF WORLD COMMERCE 122 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT 143 FERROCONCRETE 150-204 NATIONAL CONSTANTS 152 1 900-1920 A. G. PERRET 154 TONY GARNIER 161 1 920-1 92 7 LE CORBUSIER AND THE YOUNGER GENERATION . .167 THE CURRENT STATUS OF FERROCONCRETE 200 Appendix 207 Illustration Credits 225 Sigfried Giedion: A Biographical Sketch 226 Index 228 This page intentionally left blank Preface Every effort has been made in this translation to follow the style of the Ger­ man text as closely as possible. This strategy was in fact made necessary by the care that Giedion himself lavished on his text: his deliberate use of images, capitalization, boldface, and emphasis on individual words or phrases as a polemic in itself, that is, as an effort to structure the text in an almost hierarchical manner, so that the reader might visually discern the essential components of each page. The veracity in this regard also extends to Giedion's particular syntax or style — for instance, when he sometimes intentionally omits verbs — or when certain key words specifically evolve frdrn his polemic. Thus Konstrukteur has been translated as "constructor" rather than the more common "engineer"; Eisenbeton has been translated (following Giedion himself) as "ferroconcrete" rather than "reinforced con­ crete." It is hoped that in this way some of the tone of Giedion's original thought has been captured. There are no italics in Giedion's original text or notes. His bibliographic references and his footnotes have been presented largely as he gave them, with only minimal editing to make them intelligible to the modern reader. It has not been possible to verify all quotations, so they are reproduced as Giedion presented them. Obvious typographical errors relating to matters of grammar, spelling, geography, names, and dates have, however, been cor­ rected in the translation. French words and quotations have also been edited to conform to standard usage. In various respects this text is very much a joint venture. I would like to thank Harry Mallgrave for his significant participation in the making of this book, Stanislaus von Moos for important comments and suggestions, Benedicte Gilman for her editing and revisions to the translation, and Lynne Kostman for her guidance of the book through its editorial phase. I would also like to express my appreciation of the work of J. Duncan Berry and David Britt, who translated from the German and French, respectively. Also special thanks to Verena Clay and to Maria Georgiadou, both of whom con­ tributed greatly to the accuracy and quality of the final translation. For a complete listing of Giedion's publications, the reader is referred to the bibliography compiled by Stanislaus von Moos and published in Hom- mage a Giedion: Profile seiner Personlichkeit (Basel: Birkhauser, 1971), 187-98. — S. Georgiadis Introduction Sokratis Georgiadis There is broad agreement among historians of modern architecture that Sigfried Giedion's Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (1928) may without reservation be called a classic of modern architectural literature (fig. 1). Reyner Banham presents this book as a kind of authorized history of Modernism: "the Modern Movement's view of its own history."1 On the basis of this book and in connection with Giedion's work as secretary of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), Spiro Kostof characterizes him as "the official historian of the Modern Movement."2 And Stanislaus von Moos maintains that with Bauen in Frankreich Giedion has "drawn the picture of a developmental continuity" that "time and again has inspired the history of modern architecture."3 Nevertheless, one can hardly describe Giedion's intention as primarily historiographic. With this book, born as it was from a series of articles writ­ ten for the journal Cicerone and still bearing "the odium of a manifesto" (von Moos), the author wanted to be, in his own words, "the conveyor of a viewpoint." He wanted to sketch a vision of a modern architecture that — in accordance with the demands of the avant-garde — broke decisively with the traditional values of the discipline. Only later did he place this vision within a historical context. He attempted to do so by means of the hypothesis that the great iron constructions of the nineteenth century and the ferroconcrete architecture produced by the pioneers of Modernism belong aesthetically under one and the same roof. Intellectually, Bauen in Frankreich is the product of Giedion's direct con­ tact with the leading personalities of Modernism, "with the artists of his own time." This contact began during the summer of 1923 with the large Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar (his first meeting with Walter Gropius) and continued during the Esprit Nouveau exhibition of 1925 in Paris (his first contact with Le Corbusier). It resulted in Giedion's numerous articles on contemporary architecture, which appeared in newspapers and professional journals in Germany and Switzerland. With the publication of Bauen in Frankreich and with the assumption of his role as secretary general of CIAM (which he helped found in 1928), Giedion the historian renounced the neutrality of an outside observer of events; he willingly shed his supposed Fig. 1. Sigfried Giedion. Courtesy Archiv S. Giedion, Institut fur Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH-Hbnggerberg, Zurich. Georgiadis innocence and became, both programmatically and definitively, an integral part of the Modern Movement. This, in any case, is how Giedion himself related the sequence of events on various occasions. Yet things began quite differently.4 Giedion was a Swiss citizen born in Prague on 14 April 1888. After com­ pleting his secondary schooling, he studied mechanical engineering in Vienna at the behest of his parents. But engineering, with a view to taking over the family's textile concern, was not to his liking, and he decided instead to study art history. In 1915 he commenced his studies at the Uni­ versity of Zurich and eventually transferred to the University of Munich, where Heinrich Wolfflin, one of the great art historians of the day, taught. Giedion did his doctoral work under Wolfflin and in 1922 published his dissertation, Spatbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus (Late Baroque and Romantic classicism).5 Concurrent with his studies he wrote poetry, prose, and — inspired by the Aktivismus literary movement — a play called Arbeit (Work), which was staged in 1917 in Vienna, Leipzig, and Basel, and in Berlin by Max Reinhardt. In the turbulent years following World War 1 Giedion became politically active and supported the Munich Raterepublik. In Munich he also met the art historian Carola Welcker, who was to become his wife. Notwithstanding his excellent preparation for it, an orderly academic career interested Giedion about as much as the management of a textile mill. Instead he cast himself in the role of a comrade-in-arms in and — wher­ ever possible — fellow creator of an admittedly still-vague but all the more passionately desired cultural renewal. It was precisely with this aim that he turned toward modern architecture, which received its first, unshakable foundation with Bauen in Frankreich. In the decade following its publication, Giedion was active as a freelance writer on art.