- Title
- Magical mirrors: reflections on the industrial subject in Mechanization Takes Command
- Creator
- Chapman, Michael
- Relation
- 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia & New Zealand (SAHANZ XXIX 2012). Myth, Nature, Heritage: The 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia & New Zealand (Launceston, Tas 5-8 July, 2012) p. 181-195
- Relation
- http://www.sahanz.net/conferences/index.html
- Publisher
- Society of Architechtural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ)
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- Drawing from the theme of ‘fabulations’, this paper will revisit Siegfried Giedion’s monumental work Mechanization Takes Command, investigating further its architectural motivations and legacy. The writing of Mechanization Takes Command coincided with a turning point in Giedion’s thinking which began to question the role of technology within society as well as the moral implications this had for human experience (and the body). In rejecting a number of founding principles of modernism (and CIAM), the paper will demonstrate how the work intersects with broader concerns of the historical avant-garde, as well as dramatising the subject of architectural history in an original and methodical way. This exposition of a new historical subject, glimpsed through the ‘magical mirror’ of history, is of ongoing significance (and concern) to the concrete histories of modernism in architecture. As will be argued, Giedion presents this subject in crisis—divided and invaded by the path of mechanisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paper makes a case that, through this realisation, Mechanization Takes Command has an affiliation with the primary concerns of the historical avantgarde, and can be tied to the theories that supported them.
- Subject
- Mechanization Takes Command; Siegfried Giedion; architecture
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1307848
- Identifier
- uon:21543
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781862956582
- Language
- eng
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