What do you think?
Rate this book
Mechanization Takes Command by Sigfried Giedion
Over the last 200 years mechanization has moved from being a marginal marvel, of interest to scientists & tinkerers, to the dominant condition of modern society & economy, so much so that it's now easy to imagine a future where mechanization even enters into the human mind & body. Siegfried Giedion's extraordinary, encyclopedic book traces the various ways in which, for better & for worse, mechanization has assumed control of our lives, from modern systems of hygiene & waste management, to agricultural production, fashion & beyond. This book isn't only clearly written but also eloquent & thoughtful in its investigation of mechanization's reach & appeal. It offers fascinating insights into the intersection between mechanization & the imagination, as manifested in literature & the visual arts. With a wealth of unusual & intriguing illustrations taken from old sales catalogs, industrial manuals, magazines & other sources, this book constitutes a remarkable & endlessly suggestive history of modernity itself, as comprehensive as it is provocatively eccentric.ForewordAnonymous history Springs of mechanizatonMeans of mechanization (locks, assembly line)Mechanization encounters the organic (agriculture, bread making, meat production)Mechanization encounters human surroundings (furniture)Mechanization encounters the household (kitchen, laundering, refrigeration)Mechanization of the bath ConclusionList of IllustrationsIndex
Hardcover
15 people are currently reading
552 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 11, 2020
This is one of those rare books that takes a simple idea (mechanization) and examines its permutations in all aspects of human invention, from lock making to painting. It has a straightforward, understandable, premise that is proven exhaustively. I studied history for many years and this is my favourite history book, bar none.
November 20, 2020
this is one of those singular books that is so focused on one thing(mechanization in this case) that it almost becomes a book about everything filtered through the lens of the chosen topic. so mechanisation becomes a way of understanding the flow of history from the early modern period, and sometimes earlier, right through to the late 40s when the book was written. he doesn't spend a great deal of time passing judgement on the trends he's describing but there is an underlying sense that something has gone wrong somewhere, and the book ends with a sort of plea for a future society that will wield mechanisation in a more human way, with the recent events of the second world war and the release of atomic energy clearly in mind. like all great books there are a lot of good digressions, for instance in order to talk about how mechanisation has affected furniture, he has to begin with the way in which comfort was understood in the middle ages, and to talk about the mechanisation of the bath we first need to learn how different cultures have conceptualised regeneration. everything is meticulously referenced and tied to material developments despite his constant refrain of this only being a brief outline using woefully limited source material, and there are lots and lots of images mostly drawn from primary sources. there is a tendency to swing between very dry factual information about technological change to vivid and often wild cultural generalizations that i found very charming. there's a kind of optimistic sweeping modernism here that would make the book just about impossible to write today.
some quotes:
"In La Villette - another point of criticism - each ox has a separate booth in which it was felled. This is a survival of handicraft practices, to which the routine of mass slaughtering is unknown. The long houses in which the cattle were slaughtered consisted of rows of single cabins set side by side. Long since, technical installations and slaughtering in large halls have superseded them. It may well be that this treatment in separate booths expresses the deeply rooted experience that the beasts can be raised only at the cost of constant care and attention to the individual animal.
The Great Plains beyond the Mississippi, where free tracts of grassland can be dominated from horseback and where the herds grow up almost without care, are implicitly related to the assembly line. In just the same way the peasant farm, where each cow has its name and has to be attended while giving birth to its calf, is linked to handicraft methods in slaughtering."
"The rocking chair, like clapboard, is one of the constants of American life. The American farmer, at the end of the day, will instinctively move to the rocker on his porch. The European peasant sits immovable through the twilight as if nailed to the bench before his cottage. These simple differences must be understood, for more profoundly than one might think, they change the course of inventive fantasy. They underlie the divergence of American and European comfort in the nineteenth century. As soon and mechanisation became a decisive power in furniture, these differences began to show."
"The easy furniture of the upholsterer no longer owns any decided shape. It has lost its clarity of structure and has become boneless.
The skeleton of the chairs and sofas has retreated deep into the cushion: a process that the French have called La victoire de la garniture sur le bois - 'the victory of the trimmings over the wood.' Every and any means are used to make the armchairs, sofas, divans, ottomans, as heavy and as bulky as possible. Foot-long fringes ometimes veil even the stumps, all that remain of the legs. The furniture increasingly tends to suggest bloated cushions. The statuary loses its constituent form beneath the machine-like smoothening, and so it is with the surfaces of the furniture, overspread at first with dull red plush, later by fabrics of dazzling orientalism.
Beneath these furry textures, which clothe cushions flat or cylindrical, the woodwork decays like fallen trees obliterated beneath blankets of moss. Heavy and unwieldy furniture dominated the situation throughout the second half of the century. The Second Empire brought to maturity a trend that had been germinating under the Restoration during the 'thirties. When Honore de Balzac describes an interior of the period in Un Fille d'Eve (1838), he notes the strong penchant for cashmere and soft carpets: 'Underfoot, one feels the mellow pile of a Belgian carpet, thick as a lawn.'"
some quotes:
"In La Villette - another point of criticism - each ox has a separate booth in which it was felled. This is a survival of handicraft practices, to which the routine of mass slaughtering is unknown. The long houses in which the cattle were slaughtered consisted of rows of single cabins set side by side. Long since, technical installations and slaughtering in large halls have superseded them. It may well be that this treatment in separate booths expresses the deeply rooted experience that the beasts can be raised only at the cost of constant care and attention to the individual animal.
The Great Plains beyond the Mississippi, where free tracts of grassland can be dominated from horseback and where the herds grow up almost without care, are implicitly related to the assembly line. In just the same way the peasant farm, where each cow has its name and has to be attended while giving birth to its calf, is linked to handicraft methods in slaughtering."
"The rocking chair, like clapboard, is one of the constants of American life. The American farmer, at the end of the day, will instinctively move to the rocker on his porch. The European peasant sits immovable through the twilight as if nailed to the bench before his cottage. These simple differences must be understood, for more profoundly than one might think, they change the course of inventive fantasy. They underlie the divergence of American and European comfort in the nineteenth century. As soon and mechanisation became a decisive power in furniture, these differences began to show."
"The easy furniture of the upholsterer no longer owns any decided shape. It has lost its clarity of structure and has become boneless.
The skeleton of the chairs and sofas has retreated deep into the cushion: a process that the French have called La victoire de la garniture sur le bois - 'the victory of the trimmings over the wood.' Every and any means are used to make the armchairs, sofas, divans, ottomans, as heavy and as bulky as possible. Foot-long fringes ometimes veil even the stumps, all that remain of the legs. The furniture increasingly tends to suggest bloated cushions. The statuary loses its constituent form beneath the machine-like smoothening, and so it is with the surfaces of the furniture, overspread at first with dull red plush, later by fabrics of dazzling orientalism.
Beneath these furry textures, which clothe cushions flat or cylindrical, the woodwork decays like fallen trees obliterated beneath blankets of moss. Heavy and unwieldy furniture dominated the situation throughout the second half of the century. The Second Empire brought to maturity a trend that had been germinating under the Restoration during the 'thirties. When Honore de Balzac describes an interior of the period in Un Fille d'Eve (1838), he notes the strong penchant for cashmere and soft carpets: 'Underfoot, one feels the mellow pile of a Belgian carpet, thick as a lawn.'"
April 16, 2018
This is one of those wacky works of history whose charm lies in the author's insane dedication to his topic, shades of Benjamin's "Arcades Project", or pretty much anything Braudel did.
The topic here, mechanization or, to put it a little clearer, "when we stopped using our hands for things and became both dissociated from each other and reality", is a good one and Giedion swan-dives into it with fervor, sometimes to its detriment. He tends to drift into wackier subjects as part of his larger theme, happily splashing in the truculent waters of such amazing themes as the history of sitting, the evolution/devolution of bathing, furniture styles, and refrigeration, to name the most fascinating parts. There are lengthy sections on the evolution of the lock, slaughterhouses, and mass production, all feeding, at least tangentially, into the main theme. There is much to love here.
The topic here, mechanization or, to put it a little clearer, "when we stopped using our hands for things and became both dissociated from each other and reality", is a good one and Giedion swan-dives into it with fervor, sometimes to its detriment. He tends to drift into wackier subjects as part of his larger theme, happily splashing in the truculent waters of such amazing themes as the history of sitting, the evolution/devolution of bathing, furniture styles, and refrigeration, to name the most fascinating parts. There are lengthy sections on the evolution of the lock, slaughterhouses, and mass production, all feeding, at least tangentially, into the main theme. There is much to love here.
Want to read
March 13, 2021McLuhan: “To the teacher of English Maholy-Nagy and Giedion offer a set of master strategies for the extension and unification of the literary with all the other arts and even sciences.”
Read
January 25, 2013Read parts of this for my diss. A bit dated, but still useful.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews