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 ...