Top 6 Quotes & Sayings by Sigfried Giedion

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Swiss architect Sigfried Giedion.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
Sigfried Giedion

Sigfried Giedion was a Bohemian-born Swiss historian and critic of architecture. His ideas and books, Space, Time and Architecture, and Mechanization Takes Command, had an important conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s. Giedion was a pupil of Heinrich Wölfflin. He was the first secretary-general of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne, and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the ETH-Zurich.

Even when dead, the hog largely refuses to submit to the machine.
Naturalistic art, as we know it, is an art which imitates the appearance of things, not as they are in reality, but as they appear at one moment from the point of view of a single spectator. This is the effect of perspective. Nothing of this sort existed in prehistory.
Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted. — © Sigfried Giedion
Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted.
Only since the turn of the century has abstraction again become recognized as an artistic means of representation. It was then that one returned to the recognition of the immense role abstraction plays in the human mind by its power of concentration upon absolute essentials.
Art, indeed, began with abstraction.
The sun is mirrored even in a coffee spoon.
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