ABSTRACT
In Space, Time and Architecture (1941), one of the central texts of the modern movement in architecture, Sigfried Giedion dealt with what he called “constituent facts:” a basic architectural language. “Constituent facts,” he wrote, “are those tendencies which, when they are suppressed, inevitably reappear. Their recurrence makes us aware that these are elements which, all together, are producing a new tradition.”1 Later, in his First Gropius Lecture at Harvard University in 1961, Giedion developed his understanding of the emergence of tradition in history by introducing the concepts of “constancy and change.”2
