Mechanization Takes Command
* Book: Mechanization Takes Command. A Contribution to Anonymous History. By Sigfried Giedion. University of Minnesota Press, 2013
URL = https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/mechanization-takes-command
Recommended by John David Ebert [1].
Description
"One of the twentieth century’s best-known architectural theorists examines the impact of mechanization on daily life. First published in 1948, Mechanization Takes Command is an examination of mechanization and its effects on everyday life. A monumental figure in the field of architectural history, Sigfried Giedion traces the evolution and resulting philosophical implications of such disparate innovations as the slaughterhouse, the Yale lock, the assembly line, tractors, ovens, and “comfort” as defined by advancements in furniture design."
Review
" a study of mass culture and standardisation as integral to modernisation "
1. Mirjana Lozanovska:
"Mechanization, strewn with confronting imagery, makes subliminal links between the phantasmatic horrors and brutalities of war evident in the ruin and rubble that Europe had become with the technologies of progress, evident in the automation and standardisation as platform for the rise of America. Does Giedion intuitively see technologies that have preceded and are indeed the teleological path of the history of human civilization in its ruins?
The mechanisation of meat production is painstakingly examined through an exhaustive collection of diagrammatic, scientific drawings, and photographic illustration of machinery that can skin or suspend an animal. This imagery is horrific now, but would it have not conjured imagery of the methods used for human torture in the concentration camps exposed just prior to publication? War is a time of rupture and has triggered disillusionment with progress. In the introduction of the fifth edition of Space Time and Architecture, Giedion states, “In the first edition of Space Time and Architecture we posed the question: Destruction or transformation of the city?”
...
His attention turns to the “anonymous history of our period, tracing our mode of life as affected by mechanization—its impact on our dwellings, our food, our furniture.” The sheer detail of the research that substantiates this anonymous history makes the work formidable. An examination of the processes of work, manufacturing, production, the invention of the factory worker, focussing on such subjects as the assembly line, scientific management, the effects of industrialisation on food production are subjects that appear very distant from the more conventional topics in design, art and architecture. Subjects closer to the established boundaries of the discipline, such as the automation of the human body, are approached with a different emphasis. The contents list of the publication is six pages long, detailing each general area with an exemplification of points for closer inspection. The subjects are curious and include “Mechanization Encounters the Organic,” and “The Nineteenth Century: Mechanization and Ruling Taste.” The contents pages also reveal a focus on domesticity and interiors producing a publication that is not looking at facades, forms, and composition of architecture more typical of the discourse during the modernist period.
At this time, it is a rhetorical question and Giedion continues to search for the expressions and technological innovations that give a new hope to the future of human society. However, the city destroyed by war is precisely the city that is not whole, not unified, the antithesis to the image of the ideal city."
2. Bryan E. Norwood:
Context on its reception:
"On the one hand, generally positive reviews from Lewis Mumford, Arnold Hauser, Paul Zucker, and Marshall McLuhan characterized many of the architectural, art historical, and non-academic responses. The reactions of academic historians and sociologists from outside the fields of art and architecture were however less-than-positive, critiquing Giedion’s selective, subjectivist, aesthetic, and at moments overly metaphysical interpretations of the objects of industrialization. The division that characterizes these reactions is not particularly surprising, as Giedion’s approach to historical material throughout his entire career tended towards both selective precision and unflinching generalization. These propensities often make his decisions about content and narrative appear arbitrary, especially when lifted out of the context of his intellectual project that, while historically informed, had particular aims for the contemporary practice of architecture. Though originally trained as an engineer, Giedion was also an heir to a bold vein of German art history—a lineage he stakes out in the introduction to Space, Time and Architecture (1941)—that developed, in large part, through the influential work of the cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt and the methodical neo-Kantian psychology of the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin."
(https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/576-1383-1-PB.pdf)