The new architecture

1913 was a milestone year for Sant’Elia during which he decided to break away from his formal academic training, cast aside the dictates of secessionist stylistic canons and set his mind to creating an architecture that would embrace the urban revolution of modernity. Around him in Milan, whose expansion was being driven by the needs of industrialised society and the technological revolution, new residential solutions were in the process of being developed as were new factory installations and the means for rapid communications needed for the more functional buildings that were beginning to appear. There were opportunities to study the approaches being adopted abroad through such specialist journals such as “Emporium” and “Vita d’arte”, as well as through general illustrated magazines such as “L’Illustrazione italiana”.
In this highly stimulating environment he began to work on simplifying structural architectural elements, relying where possible on the most advanced building methods using iron, concrete and glass. In a series of drawings, aptly dubbed later by the futurists as “architectural dynamisms”, he sketched agile and slender volumes with no specifically stated use, formal exercises stripped of all decorative encumbrances to reveal juxtapositions and the intersections of frames, pilasters, buttresses, pyramids and cylindrical or rectangular towers that added relief and depth to stark  geometric figures.
As time went by, and after a number of months of work on the rough urban design drawings, the stripped down skeletons of buildings steadily evolved into so many portions of modern cities, becoming ideas for dwellings, hangars for aeroplanes and dirigibles, bridges, theatres and electrical power stations, specifically intended to be freed from the shells and adornments that would conceal or obfuscate their practical use. At the end of this creative process, the individual approaches to a complex metropolitan process would come together to suggest a prophetic panorama of a future megalopolis. The environment in question would be driven by electrical energy, vehicles would run on different levels while stepped buildings would rise upwards, accessed by external lifts. The “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture”, which came out in June of 1914 after the Gruppo Nuove Tendenze [New Trends Group] exhibitions which brought Sant’Elia’s genius to the world, referred to this scene as “tumultuary abyss”, at the centre of which stood a colossal multi-station for railways and aircraft, from which means of rapid transport branched off in all directions to keep the city’s masses constantly on the move. It was nothing less than the dreamt of city of the new millennium “like a huge agile, mobile and dynamic building site” with houses “like gigantic machines”.P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; direction: ltr; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); widows: 2; orphans: 2; }P.western { font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; }P.cjk { font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; }P.ctl { font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; }

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