FUTURIST ARCHITECTURE

FUTURIST ARCHITECTURE: translation

   Futurism was an early-20th-century art movement founded by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and described in his Manifesto of Futurism, published in 1909. This organization of writers and artists included the Italian architect Antonio Sant'Elia, who held highly detailed theoretical views on modernist architecture that he documented in a series of powerfully rendered architectural sketches published in his Città Nuova in 1914. The treatise Futurist Architecture was published that same year, and attributed to Sant'Elia as well. As a socialist, Sant'Elia had many of the same concerns as Russian artists after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and these concerns formed the aesthetic basis for an architectural style based on images of speed, energy, and the quick pace of "modern" life. Kinetic sculpture and abstract painting also influenced Futurist architecture. Sant'Elia was, furthermore, fascinated by industrial cities and modern systems of transportation, and he sought to integrate the two into his plans for a vast, highly mechanized modern city. Despite his untimely death in 1915 while fighting in World War I, many of the revolutionary designs he created had a profound influence on Constructivist architecture and on the modernist urban plans made by such International style architects as Le Corbusier.