The Giedion World

The Giedion Universe: An introduction to the work, significance and impact, and estate of two of modernism's most distinguished scholarson 420 pages with 198 color illustrations featuring 630 documents, objects, and photographs

Sigfried Giedion (18881968) and Carola Giedion-Welcker (18931979) were among the most distinguished and influential scholars of art and architectual history during the 20th century's earlier dacades. Of particular impact was their role in connecting leading protagonists of modernism in architecture, art, and literature, such as Alvar Aalto, Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Breuer, Max Ernst, Walter Gropius, Barbara Hepworth, Le Corbusier, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, or Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The discourses they initiated, for example on the New Vision in photography or a Synthesis of Arts, have lost nothing of their relevance and provide new starting points until the present day.

The estate of Sigfried and Carola Giedion-Welcker is today kept in Zurich at ETH Zurich's Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, the Swiss Isntitute for Art Research, the University of Zurich's Institute of Romance Studies, and the James Joyce Foundation. It comprises some 16,000 letters, 10,000 photographic prints and negatives, a wealth of other papers, and a vast library.

This new book offers a revaluation of Sigfried and Carola Giedion-Welcker work, impact, and lasting significance. Editor and contributors were the first to draw fully on the estate, which has been opened entirely to researchers only recently. Featuring a vast number of previously unpublished documents and other images alongside excerpts from the extensive correspondence the two maintained with their artist friends and colleagues in academia, it provides a unique and manifold insight into the Giedion universe.

Winner of the DAM Architectural Book Award 2019.

• Englische Ausgabe von Die Welt der Giedions. Sigfried Giedion und Carola Giedion-Welcker im Dialog (ISBN 978-3-85881-610-8)

  Autorentext
  Almut Grunewald ist Kunsthistorikerin und wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am gta Archiv der ETH Zürich. Seit 2016 leitet sie das Forschungsprojekt zum Nachlass Giedion-Welcker.