Sigfried Giedion was a pioneering modernist architectural critic, art historian and secretary-general of the International Congress of Modern Architecture. Since it was first published in 1941, his classic study Space, Time and Architecture has been essential reading for anyone who wanted to understand modern architecture. Despite subsequent revisions, this 900-page tome is stylistically rather dated, but as a survey of the built urban environment since the citta ideale of the Renaissance it remains a remarkable work of scholarship and analysis. From the baroque revamping of the Eternal City (“one of the most sumptuous achievements of civic design”) through to Bloomsbury's garden squares (“fully the equal” of St Peter's in Rome), Giedion provides a memorable tour of architecture and city planning. For the first time more people now live in cities than the countryside, and Giedion would certainly have found much to criticise in our modern megacities. His call to restore “the intimacy of life”, the sense of human scale, is more important than ever.
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