ABSTRACT
We can begin this concluding chapter by turning once more to the central idea of Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture: the necessary connection between the theory of relativity in physics and concepts of simultaneity in art and architecture. Giedion implies that the revolutions which took place in art around 1910 – he mentions cubism, purism, constructivism, neoplasticism and futurism – were a historical necessity: the inevitable and obligatory expression of Einstein's discovery of relativity at about the same time:
In many places, about 1910, a consciousness that the painter's means of expression had lost contact with modern life was beginning to emerge. But it was in Paris, with cubism, that these efforts first attained a visible result … Cubism breaks with Renaissance perspective. It views objects relatively: that is, from several points of view, no one of which has exclusive authority. And in so dissecting objects it sees them simultaneously from all sides – from above and below, from inside and outside … The presentation of objects from several points of view introduces a principle which is intimately bound up with modern life – simultaneity. It is a temporal coincidence that Einstein should have begun his famous work … in 1905 with a careful definition of simultaneity. 1
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