His ideas and books, Space, Time and Architecture, and Mechanization Takes Command, had an important conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s.
He then studied art history in Munich with Heinrich Wölfflin, graduating in 1922 with a thesis on Romanesque and late Baroque Classicism.
Brinckmann, a well-known art historian, who invited him to Cologne, an offer that Giedion refused because he was not interested in an academic career.
In the same year, he took part in the collective initiative Werkbundsiedlung Neubühl, one of the first residential centers in the style of the modern movement, remaining on the steering committee until 1939.
Through countless interventions in international trade journals, he expressed his support for Le Corbusier's League of Nations project in Geneva, won in 1927 but disqualified because the submission was in the wrong medium.