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Architecture, You and Me
We certainly do not recommend a return to a primitive way of life. We love modern civilization. It is one of the few honest expressions of our being today. It is a part of us. But it is not the whole.
A long time ago man lost the key to the inner meaning of technology, of traffic, of the daily round of his life. His inner feelings became disassociated from these, because art - official art - lost all contact with the life that has grown out from this civilization.
No civilization can develop without those high notes that we call art.
Art? Feeling?
Means of expression are needed with no other apparent purpose than to serve as containers for our feelings. Everyone needs some outlet for his feelings. The outlet can be a frown, a sign, or a voluptuous gasp.
The frown is no help, since it does not banish the feelings. They remain. They accumulate. So each man longs for an environment that is the symbol or mirror of his inner desires. Everyone longs for a prolonged satisfaction of these inner desires - some more ardently, others more contentedly. There is no political platform and no community movement that has not some such symbol.
There are also pseudo-symbols. These always arise when the true situation, for reasons of convenience, is concealed behind a false facade.
The history of the nineteenth century is a history of pseudo-symbols.
The consequences are clear: for those matters that arise newly from the innermost depths of a period, that are thrust aside in the daily round of life, man finds no inner assurance, no guiding voice. As a result mechanization becomes rampant and life brutalized.
- Sigfried Giedion, Architecture, You and Me, 1958
A long time ago man lost the key to the inner meaning of technology, of traffic, of the daily round of his life. His inner feelings became disassociated from these, because art - official art - lost all contact with the life that has grown out from this civilization.
No civilization can develop without those high notes that we call art.
Art? Feeling?
Means of expression are needed with no other apparent purpose than to serve as containers for our feelings. Everyone needs some outlet for his feelings. The outlet can be a frown, a sign, or a voluptuous gasp.
The frown is no help, since it does not banish the feelings. They remain. They accumulate. So each man longs for an environment that is the symbol or mirror of his inner desires. Everyone longs for a prolonged satisfaction of these inner desires - some more ardently, others more contentedly. There is no political platform and no community movement that has not some such symbol.
There are also pseudo-symbols. These always arise when the true situation, for reasons of convenience, is concealed behind a false facade.
The history of the nineteenth century is a history of pseudo-symbols.
The consequences are clear: for those matters that arise newly from the innermost depths of a period, that are thrust aside in the daily round of life, man finds no inner assurance, no guiding voice. As a result mechanization becomes rampant and life brutalized.
- Sigfried Giedion, Architecture, You and Me, 1958
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