Liberated Dwelling / Befreites Wohnen is Sigfried Giedion's 1929 manifesto on modernist housing — a primary document in the ideological formation of CIAM and the push to industrialise construction for mass public housing.
About This Book
Compact but combative, Befreites Wohnen stakes out the terms of modernist domestic life at the precise moment the movement was consolidating its ambitions. Giedion builds his argument not through dense theory but through visual comparison — photographs and images placed in deliberate tension to make the case for light, air, openness, and the liberating potential of industrial construction. As both author and designer, Giedion controlled the rhetoric of the page itself, making this the most formally unified of his works. For anyone tracing the intellectual history of modern architecture, CIAM housing ideology, or the role of the critic-propagandist in shaping twentieth-century urbanism, this facsimile reissue is an essential primary source.
Key Features
- 100 pages of argumentative visual montage — photographs and image pairings designed by Giedion himself to advance the manifesto's thesis
- Published by Lars Müller Publishers, ISBN 9783037785683
What You'll Discover
- How Giedion deployed visual comparison rather than written argument as his primary rhetorical instrument — an early and influential model for the architectural manifesto
- The housing ideology that underpinned CIAM and shaped the international debate on industrialised construction and public dwelling in the early twentieth century
- The unique instance in Giedion's career where he exercised full control as both author and book designer, making the object itself a demonstration of modernist principles
- The origins of Giedion's role as architecture's foremost propagandist — the intellectual position he would later expand in Space, Time and Architecture
About the Author
Sigfried Giedion was a Swiss art historian and architectural critic who served as secretary-general of CIAM and became one of the most influential propagandists of the modern movement. Befreites Wohnen marks an early and formative step in his rise as the movement's principal intellectual advocate.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 100
- Dimensions: 155 × 190 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783037785683
- Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architectural historians, CIAM researchers, students of modernist urbanism and housing theory, and designers with a serious interest in the manifesto as a form.