Sigfried Giedion: Liberated Dwelling 'Befreites Wohnen'

In 1929, the great Swiss historian and architecture critic Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968)―later the author of the classics Space, Time and Architecture (1941) and Mechanization Takes Command (1948)―issued Befreites Wohnen (Liberated Dwelling), a small but vocal architecture manifesto and an early expression of modernist housing ideology. From the vision of an international architectural modernism (a mission with which Giedion was involved as the first secretary-general of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, between 1928 and 1959) to debates on the industrialization of construction processes and their impact on public housing, Liberated Dwelling expresses the dreams and anxieties of early 20th-century modernist architecture.