ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

Begun in the United States in the late 19th century, the City Beautiful movement enjoyed a relatively brief reign, fading into obscurity during the New Deal and the rise of modernism. City Beautiful architects and planners sought to bring elements of city planning, architecture, and landscape architecture into a harmonious unity. It aspired to many of the principles of baroque or neoclassical city design, which had transformed the medieval cores of European cities such as Rome from the reign of Pope Sixtus V in the Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 496 late 16th century to Paris under the prefecture of Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann in the mid19th century. Equally embedded in City Beautiful was a celebration of neoclassical architecture, transplanted to American soil by architects loyal to the aesthetic principles promoted by the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Although its intellectual seeds were sown by a handful of 19th-century figures, such as landscape architect Frederick L...

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 ...