On 20 May 1914 Antonio Sant’Elia from Italy and Mario Chiattone from Switzerland,
two young architects in the Italian avant-garde movement Il Nuovo Tendenze, exhibited
drawings that illustrated fragments of a new urban metropolis. Chiattone’s contribution,
entitled “Structures of a Modern Metropolis,” included several fine renditions of high-rise
apartment buildings that presaged later developments in the 1920s and 1930s, but they
were overshadowed by Sant’Elia’s collection of drawings, entitled La città nuova (The New City), his
vision of Milan in the year 2000. These drawings were accompanied in the exhibition
catalog by a written text, a messaggio (or manifesto) on the problems of modern architecture,
bearing Sant’Elia’s name only. This polemical essay reappeared in a reworked form
several weeks later, on 11 July 1914, as L’a rchitettu ra futu ris ta (Futurist Architecture), still authored by
Sant’Elia, but bearing the unmistakable stamp of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the
mouthpiece of Italian futurism.
Dispute still lingers over the precise relationship of Sant’Elia to Marinetti and to the
futurist movement in general. Most critics agree that Sant’Elia was primarily a socialist
who joined Marinetti’s movement without much enthusiasm on account of its
increasingly outspoken nationalist character, at odds with the more internationalist views
of socialist thought at that time. But there is little doubt that Sant’Elia’s vision of the new
city, an urban environment infatuated with the awesome potential of mechanistic form, is
futurist in concept, even if not specifically created under that banner.
Antonio Sant’Elia was born in Como, in northern Italy, in 1880. He studied
architecture in Milan and later in Bologna, where he graduated at the age of 24. His
studies were interrupted by a period of apprenticeship with the Villoressi Canal Company
and some time spent in the works department of the commune of Milan. On his return to
Milan from Bologna in 1912, Sant’ Elia was in touch with the polemical futurist group
under Marinetti’s provocative leadership and clearly had sympathy with several of their
aesthetic aims having to do with the dynamism and mechanized setting of futurist life in a
truly modern metropolis.
The eleventh proposition of the original Futurist Manifesto, published by
Marinetti in 1909, praises “the midnight fervor of arsenals and shipyards
blazing with electric moons; insatiable stations swallowing the smoking
serpents of their trains; factories hung from clouds by the twisted threads
of their smoke; [and] bridges flashing like knives in the sun, giant gymnasts that leap over rivers.”
This passage could serve as a preface for Sant’Elia’s vision, and in a series (possibly
hundreds) of provocative sketches made in 1912, 1913, and 1914, Sant’Elia sought to
translate the spirit and content of mechanical innovations into architectural and urban
form. Tall sculpted shapes define a city of rapid travel and technical purity, forms that
owed much to the artifacts of the new industrial society such as power stations—an icon
of Marinetti’s futurist vocabulary—and engineering structures such as great dams. One of
the most famous drawings, Stazione aeroplani (1914)—a study for the more finished version in La città nuova
exhibition—illustrates a railway station shaped like a huge dam. Trains vanish beneath
the great, sloping mass, raked by escalators and flanked by symmetrical towers, whereas
to the rear an aircraft landing strip vanishes into the distance between clifflike slabs of
buildings—a particularly dangerous transport interchange that reappeared in Le
Corbusier’s drawings a decade and more later.
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Several lines in Sant’Elia’s manifesto that accompanied his drawings at
the 1914 exhibition echo the sentiments and wording of the Futurist
Manifesto closely, but the text, put together by a colleague, Ugo Nebbia,
from Sant’Elia’s own words, indicates that the architect was quite capable
of formulating futurist polemics and visions without any direct help (or interference) from Marinetti. Sant’Elia’s
words marry with his images to create a future world in which architects “must invent
and rebuild ex novo our Modern city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard. …Elevators
must no longer hide away like solitary worms in the stairwells…but must swarm up the
facades like serpents of glass and iron.”
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 494
In none of the drawings and sketches are conventional streets or buildings indicated.
There is no indication of traditional urban structure. Instead, Sant’Elia depicts the city as
a megastructure of connected building masses and multilevel movement systems,
presaging the fascination with urban megastructures during the 1960s and 1970s. In this
aspect his vision of the future city differs sharply from that of Tony Garnier, whose Cité industriel le of
1901–04, although relying on hydroelectric power and containing large industrial
buildings and a modern train station, still contains residential areas comprising streets of
neat homes surrounded by greenery. In Sant’Elia’s vision, such residential quarters are
superseded by stacked apartment houses, their stepped profiles lined with terraces and
accessed by elevator towers and flying bridges.
It is not clear whether Città nuova was to replace the existing city fabric of Milan completely.
However, in accordance with futurist principles that placed emphasis on the continual
rein-vention and rebuilding of the city, it is evident that by drawing a completely new
urban world, Sant’Elia did want to inspire people to supplant existing cities. This cleared
site approach was emphasized again in Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan vois in for central Paris and was to
come true with many devastating consequences in American and European cities during
the urban renewal period of the 1950s and 1960s.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it is easy to blame Sant’Elia’s visions for some of the
negative physical and social outcomes of this radical demolition approach that are evident
to architects and planners at the end of the 20th century. But these visions were born of
their time, and the world of fin-de-siècle Europe was vastly different; there was a
growing sense, especially in Italy (only recently unified in 1861), that the old age was
passing and a new one beginning, politically and in terms of technology.
For most of the 19th century, new technologies had little impact on the appearance of
Italian cities, but the last quarter of the century saw massive changes, especially in the
northern cities of Milan and Turin. These cities became major industrial centers in which
new building types—train stations, large factories, and power stations—jostled side by
side with older buildings. Electric lighting came to city buildings and streets, and these
same thoroughfares became clogged with traffic and the new electric trams. This
transformation of Milan—the home base of Marinetti and the futurists—from an Old
World princely capital to an industrial metropolis galvanized futurist thought. Clearly the
new world would not fit into the antiquated Renaissance palaces of Italian history; the
young nation of Italy, with new technological power and potential, needed a
correspondingly modern urban environment in which to flourish. But before this
contemporary city could arise, Sant’Elia theorized, Italy had to be shaken from its
architectural slumber and cast off the burden of its classical past and deadening
architectural conventions.
This new urban world, created with an architecture of engineering directness and bold
sculptural form, is illustrated precisely in Sant’Elia’s drawings for La citta nuova. His forms, surfaces,
and spaces destroyed the traditions and styles of classicism and historical eclecticism.
Sant’Elia reworked several of his earlier sketches, transforming them from fluid
Expressionist compositions to finely wrought illustrations, drafted with exquisite care and
precision. Using black ink and black (occasionally blue-black) pencil on paper and
tracing paper, Sant’Elia transmuted the flowing romantic images of his preparatory
drawings into hard-edged perspectives that transcended other visualizations of the future
metropolis. When compared with contemporary illustrations of future New York by
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R.Rummel (1911) and H.Wiley Corbett (1913), which comprise large, lumpen buildings
and bridges clothed in standard historicist details, Sant’ Elia presented an architecture of
stark and flashing profile, developed with convincing engineering details that pushed new
materials and technologies to their limits.
For the Nuovo Tendenze exhibition Sant’Elia selected 16 drawings comprising the
Airplane and Train Station; the Casa Nuova apartment building and four other high-rise
apartment buildings (referred to as “terraced houses”) incorporating external elevators
and sited adjacent to multilevel roadways; three power stations; a bridge; and six other
detail or preparatory sketches. Taken together, these thoroughly worked out illustrations
provided the most heroic and poetic conception of all the Utopian visions of the 20thcentury
city. Compared to the polite, well-mannered comprehensiveness of Garnier’s Cité industrielle,
the rationalist bombast of Le Corbusier’s Plan vois in (1925), or the idiosyncratic prairie aesthetic of
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1934–35), Sant’Elia’s imagination depicts, in a
marvelous pictorial synthesis, a city infatuated with the majestic and liberating potential
of the machine. Sant’Elia’s tragic, if heroic, death at the battle of Monfalcone, on 10
October 1916, denied the world a more developed examination of this urban potential.
The futurist architecture of La città nuova died with its precocious young author.
