Giedion's Figural Conception of Urban Space-Time & The Analysis of Le Corbusier's Modern Urbanisms

Abstract

Sigfried Giedion's presentation of three figures to analyze urban space-time in history can be used in turn to understand often overlooked aspects of early modernist urban schemes, like Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin, the Pavilon de L'Esprit Nouveau, and the Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants. Giedion identifies a need for understanding the new scale of industrialized urban space-time with a synthetic frame of reference necessitating the movement and memory of a sentient viewer. This need had already been felt by avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, with Cubist and Purist pictorial space presenting the viewer with a synthetic, simultaneous space by fracturing the picture plane and challenging the transparency of linear perspective. Recognizing that Le Corbusier utilized this synthetic viewing frame to produce his paintings and organize his buildings, exhibits and texts allows for the construction of an alternative history of Modernism that may be more useful to contemporary urban planners than the usual recourse to oversimplified caricatures of a history governed by the static frame.