Antonio Sant'Elia

Antonio Sant'Elia was born in Como, Lombardy. A builder by training, he opened a design office in Milan in 1912 and became involved with the Futurist movement. Between 1912 and 1914, influenced by industrial cities of the United States and the Viennese architects Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, he began a series of design drawings for a futurist Città Nuova ("New City") that was conceived as symbolic of a new age.
Many of these drawings were displayed at the only exhibition of the Nuove Tendenze group (of which he was a member) exhibition in May/June 1914 at the "Famiglia Artistica" gallery. Today, some of these drawings are on permanent display at Como's art gallery (Pinacoteca). (They used to be in the Villa Olmo)
The manifesto Futurist Architecture was published in August 1914, supposedly by Sant'Elia, though this is subject to debate. In it the author stated that "the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials".^[1] His vision was for a highly industrialised and mechanized city of the future, which he saw not as a mass of individual buildings but a vast, multi-level, interconnected and integrated urban conurbation designed around the "life" of the city. His extremely influential designs featured vast monolithic skyscraper buildings with terraces, bridges and aerial walkways that embodied the sheer excitement of modern architecture and technology. Even in this excitement for technology and modernity, in Sant'Elia's monumentalism, however, can be found elements of Art Nouveau architect Giuseppe Sommaruga.^[2]
A nationalist as well as an irredentist, Sant'Elia joined the Italian army as Italy entered World War I in 1915. He was killed during the Battles of the Isonzo, near Monfalcone. Most of his designs were never built, but his futurist vision has influenced many architects, artists and designers.

Industrial Revolution

Although we face unique urban problems in our day, many of the strengths and weaknesses of our present cities have been inherited directly from the nineteenth century.

The impact of the Industrial Revolution marked an entirely novel relationship between Western man and the organization of his cities, cities whose urban complex was composed of elements related within the context rules and a code practiced by inhabitant and planner alike. The urban system's relationship with the social systems (political power, learning, economy and religion) asserted itself upon the average citizen and thus integrated him into the structure of a given society.


In a given town, the urban order might have related the position of an individual's house to the cathedral and at the same time individualized him within a community along the ribbon of the street. This urban plan was a direct projection of the objectives of clergy, feudal lord or merchant guild.

This urban order was shattered by the radical transformation brought about by the Industrial Revolution. It was accompanied by a spontaneous and unprecedented urbanization overflowing the walls of Europe's ancient towns and the forming of new agglomerations, which not only changed the spatial organization which existed, but also the mentality of the city dweller himself.

The city dweller was unable to assimilate this dramatic urban revolution for he was now confronted with a spatial order devoid of its traditional richness of meaning, an organization derived solely from the economic cause of high demographic concentrations due to a capitalist-industrial production.

In 1845, Friedrich Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England, in which he describes the conditions existing in Manchester, as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Following is an excerpt of that work:

"Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can. These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one or two-storied cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always irregularly built. These houses of three or four rooms and a kitchen form, throughout England, some parts of London excepted the general dwellings of the working-class. The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human beings here live crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these working-men's quarters may readily be imagined. Further, the streets serve as drying grounds in fine weather; lines stretched across from house to house, and hung with wet clothing".