The Shape of Things

MECHANIZATION TAKES COMMAND (743 pp.) --Siegfried Gledlon-- Oxford ($12.50).

Many people have wondered what mechanization is doing to man; nobody yet has investigated, documented, and illustrated the question to the extent of this enormous and fascinating book.

Brainchild of Switzerland's 55-year-old Professor Giedion--whose Space, Time and Architecture (1941) was a notable technical study--Mechanization Takes Command takes a tremendous stab at measuring the changeable human animal against the tools and technical appliances which have been associated with him from the early records of history to the present day. Professor Giedion holds that "the sun is mirrored even in a coffee spoon," looks for the truth about man in "humble things," and finds Hitler and Napoleon no more instructive than Linus Yale (locks), Clarence Birdseye (frozen food) and Sylvester Graham (bread).

Ham & Hammocks. Like the accompanying text, the 501 photographs in this book embrace everything under the sun--including whole centuries of kitchen sinks. Looking at one another with some surprise are McCormick harvesters, Roman baths, barber chairs, egg beaters and tricycles. Victorian maidens swing gently in new-fangled hammocks--oblivious of a conveyor-beltful of hogs swinging equally gently toward Swift's and Armour's hams.

Daily life, says Professor Giedion, has always been a series of movements set in space. The ancient Greek falsely saw the world as the "immovable center of the cosmos," and his classical temples were expressive of eternal equilibrium. Medieval man saw the world as something set in motion by the hand of God; he found peace in rooms whose lack of furniture ("movables") gave spacious tranquillity to his austere thoughts. His dinner table was set up on a trestle, promptly removed when he had eaten. Since that time, man has come to abhor the vacuum of space: he still talks of "setting the table," but in fact his furniture is almost as stable as the four walls which surround it, and much more important. Where once the human hand created the bare minimum, the machine now creates the dressy maximum.

Let's Not Masticate. Twentieth Century man is as unlike his forebears as the Yale lock is unlike the wooden tumbler-lock of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Democracy has taught him to hate slavery--and the machine has made him so little of a slave that he scarcely needs to use his hands and jaws and legs. The more "neutral" and "uniform" a product is, the more comfortable he finds it. The 19th Century gardener grew 30 kinds of apples in his orchard, ranging in taste from bitter to sweet. Today, "the large red apple" caters to the public love of all that is "sweet, smooth, and outwardly appealing." Bread, which was once the crusty staff of life, is now "half-masticated . . . before reaching the mouth," and caters to the taste which prefers fruit juice to fruit, chopped meat to a cut off the joint, mashed potato, ice cream, and a host of packaged powders which water turns into infinite varieties of pap.

Professor Giedion is not the sort of crank who advocates a return to 100% manual labor. But he believes that if man cannot protect himself from the emotionless "collectivism" of the machine, "future generations will perhaps designate this period as one of mechanized barbarism, the most repulsive barbarism of all."

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