Abstract
This chapter examines the influence of the Swiss art historian and architectural critic Sigfried Giedion on the collaborative work that developed during the Culture and Communications Seminar (1953–1955) and the publication of the Explorations journal (1953–1959) at the University of Toronto. Chaired by Marshall McLuhan, the graduate seminar was co-directed by cultural anthropologist Edmund Carpenter along with British urban planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, political scientist Thomas Easterbrook and psychologist D. Carleton Williams. They sought to develop interdisciplinary methodologies using a “field” approach to discern the new grammars and environments created by electronic communications technologies. Building on Harold Innis’s thesis of the bias of communication, the group turned to the work of Giedion, whose ideas were represented in seminar discussions by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, who served as translator, editor and arguably co-author of many of his writings over a period of 20 years. Under the influence of Giedion’s work, a methodology grew out of the seminar that viewed the environment as an active rather than a passive space. The seminar and journal thus form an important starting point for defining the research agenda of the Toronto School and represent an important turn towards interdisciplinary research in Canada. Together, the seminar group helped initiate a Canadian tradition of studying culture, communication, and media. This chapter is based on a close examination of Giedion’s works and original archival research into the group’s papers.
O Mechanization! They do not know [any] more the products of their soil! (Sigfried Giedion to Marshall McLuhan, from Franconia, New Hampshire, 6 August 1943 (Marshall McLuhan Fonds: MG31, D156, Vol. 24, File 65) (Hereafter MMF.))
As far as my media studies are concerned, the Mechanization Takes Command by Sigfried Giedion is indispensable background for the languages of media. As soon as one approaches a field, one has to abandon subjects. Or rather, subjects are automatically included within the field. Such is the bias of print in America that even Dewey, while trying to say this, couldn’t see it.
(Marshall McLuhan to Harry Skornia, Executive Director, National Association of Education Broadcasters, 20 January 1960. (MMF: MG31, D156, Vol. 72, File 11))
This research was made possible with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and a 2015 Visiting Fellowship at the Institute for Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Special thanks go to Dr. Janine Marchessault, York University, and to Dr. Reto Geiser, Rice University, for their continual reference and discussion; to the estates of Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter, and Jaqueline Tywrhitt; to Mr. Daniel Weiss and Mr. Gregor Harbusch of the GTA Archiv, Institut für die Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH Zürich; and to Mr. Kurt Helfrich, Chief Archivist and Collections Manager, British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects. Part of this paper was previously translated as (2014) “Sigfried Giedion und die Explorations: Die anonyme Geschichte der Medien-Architektur,” translated by Johannes Paßmann, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 11: Dokument und Dokumentarisches, 144–154.
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Notes
- 1.
From the 1920s on, Giedion was committed to defending modern architecture for “the humanisation of urban life.” As a historian of architectural forms and the spaces of material culture, Giedion viewed art and architectural history above all as an evolution of spatial paradigms, culminating in what he termed the “new tradition” of the twentieth century. His first book, Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (1928) outlines the significance of new materials and construction techniques from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly iron, glass and ferroconcrete. His second book Befreites Wohnen (1929) documents these trends as a photo-commentary that is even more radical in its critique of traditional assumptions about architectural spaces (Heynen 2000: 30). A decade later, in 1938, through his contact with Walter Gropius, Giedion delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, which were published in 1941 as his canonical Space, Time and Architecture. Through these key texts, Giedion pioneered a new history of mechanization and industrialization persistently reflected through the lens of modernism, and consistently focused on the conjunction of art, science and technology. Mechanization Takes Command (1948) shifted from studies of architectural and urban space to the spatiotemporal implications of everyday inventions in the age of mechanisation.
- 2.
“die Gebiete durchdringen sich”.
- 3.
“Notes on the 6th Meeting.” Culture and Communications Seminar, University of Toronto, 10 November 1954. MMF: MG31, D156, Vol. 203, File 30.
- 4.
Cavell notes similarly that Dick Higgins attributed the notion of “intermedia” to an essay by Coleridge of 1812 (1966[2001]: 52).
- 5.
It should be noted that Giedion’s wife Carola Giedion-Welcker was an acquaintance of Joyce and wrote extensively about Joyce, Apollinaire, and Schwitters. Sigfried Giedion’s reference to these artists should be seen through the lens of Carola Giedion-Welcker’s work. I wish to thank Reto Geiser for emphasizing this point to me in conversation.
- 6.
In “Notes on the Media as Art Forms” (1954b) McLuhan seized on Giedion’s distinctions between Europe and North America. In Giedion’s “masterly account of the mechanization of the bread industry he expressed bewilderment at the fact that European immigrants accustomed to excellent bread were in America eager for the ersatz loaf. The answer lies in the fact that we are also eager for ersatz dreams, houses and entertainment. Is it not the sheer magical power of the technological environment which leads us to prefer the artificial to the natural?” (8).
- 7.
Hereafter SGP.
- 8.
Carpenter and McLuhan claimed in their co-authored article “The New Languages” that “T.S. Eliot has said he would prefer an illiterate audience, for the ways of official literacy do not equip the young to know themselves, the past, or the present” (1956: 51).
- 9.
Recent, as yet uncatalogued, additions to the Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Papers (Royal Institute of British Architects), donated in 2015 by the Estate of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, revealed a series of letters between Giedion and Tyrwhitt, in which Giedion urged Tyrwhitt to seek out McLuhan in late 1951. I thank Kurt Helfrich, Chief Archivist and Collections Manager, British Architectural Library, for permitting me to view these additions. See also McLuhan to Elsie McLuhan, November 1952: “Tonight we are having Jacqueline [sic] Tyrwhitt visiting professor of Town Planning in the School of Architecture. Siegfried [sic] Giedion wrote me about her when thanking me for the book [The Mechanical Bride]” (1987: 233); Tyrwhitt to McLuhan, 16 April 1968: “He [Giedion] was the reason we ever got to know one another.” MMF: MG31, D156, Vol. 39, File 59.
- 10.
Hereafter JTP.
- 11.
“Two articles, one on the mechanics of auditory space, the other on acoustic “patterning,” might have been more diplomatic. But we needed some input from Carl, and clearly it wouldn’t come without help” (Carpenter, in Theall 2001: 241). The proofs of the Explorations in Communication anthology reveal that the “Acoustic Space” chapter (Carpenter and McLuhan 1960b: 65–70) should initially have been credited to Williams and Carpenter, suggesting (unlike other accounts of this story) that it was Carpenter who first revised Williams’ contribution. Williams’ name is crossed out by hand and replaced with McLuhan (MMF: MG31, D156, Vol. 72, File 1).
- 12.
Giedion’s ongoing studies into the beginnings of art and architecture—the dark interiors of pyramids and temples, and the differentiation between enclosed and unenclosed spaces—triggered a communal understanding of auditory or acoustic space as an interplay of the senses. This was a theme related to the group by Tyrwhitt, but it was the psychologist Carl Williams who intervened to observe that “unenclosed space could best be considered as acoustic or auditory space.” Carpenter later recounted that this idea itself was electrifying:
Marshall quoted Symbolist poetry. Jackie [Tyrwhitt] mentioned the Indian city of Fatehpur Sikri. Tom [Easterbrook] saw parallels in medieval Europe. I talked about the Eskimo. (Carpenter, in Theall 2001: 241)
In the minutes of the 8th Seminar meeting on 24 November 1954, one of the first discussion of acoustic space is recorded. Williams puts forward many of the spatial and sensual concepts that McLuhan and Carpenter would seize upon: “space is normally conceived as “empty space” […] between things,” but not for the infant whose “experience of depth is acquired by personal movement and by touch.” In this space “we learn to locate noise-producing objects […] We hear equally well all around. Space is directionless and has no clear bounds. We cannot shut our ears at will.” The “electricity” of which of Carpenter speaks is palpable in the ensuing discussion: “Carpenter read a paragraph from Kadinsky connoting color with sound. McLuhan said that the translation of one sense in terms of another was the origin, in scholastic philosophy, of the term “common sense.” Tyrwhitt read a paper on the “Moving Eye.”” In the core of Fatehpur Sikri in India “the disposition of the buildings within and around it cannot be explained by linear perspective with its emphasis on a focal position” (MMF: MG31, D156, Vol. 203, File 30).
- 13.
- 14.
After delivering the first volume of the Eternal Present, Giedion requested that Carpenter send him his “superb examples of x-ray carvings” (12 December 1959; SGP: 43-K-1959-12-12(G): 4).
- 15.
The experiment would be repeated at the Ryerson Institute two years later, allowing “each medium full play of its possibilities” (Carpenter 1957: 18). In this second round, radio topped television, but both “manifested a decisive advantage of the lecture and written forms” (McLuhan, in Carpenter 1957: 18).
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Darroch, M. (2016). Giedion and Explorations: Confluences of Space and Media in Toronto School Theorization. In: Friesen, N. (eds) Media Transatlantic: Developments in Media and Communication Studies between North American and German-speaking Europe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28489-7_5
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