Place, time and architecture : the growth of new traditions

'Space, Time and Architecture is intended for those who are alarmed by the present state of our culture and anxious to find a way out of the apparent chaos of its contradictory tendencies.' So wrote the Swiss Modernist Sigfried Giedion (1941, p. vi) introducing the first edition of his pioneering and influential history to the background and cultural context in which modern architecture and urban planning grew and flourished. He stated there that: 'History is not a compilation of facts, but an insight into a moving process of life.' In the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures Giedion gave at Harvard University in 1938–1939 he endeavoured to bring some order and understanding to the development of Modernism in the context of the great buildings and cities of the world, even as many were being blown to pieces in Europe during the Second World War