Futurist Architecture

Futurist architecture was an early twentieth century Italian movement associated above all with the architect Antonio Sant'Elia, who lived from 1888 to 1916 and left behind almost no completed buildings, being remembered instead for his bold visionary sketches. Between 1912 and 1914, influenced by the urban landscape of the United States and by architects including Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, Sant'Elia produced a series of drawings for a futurist Citta Nuova, or New City, envisioned not as a collection of individual buildings but as a vast, multi level, mechanized urban conurbation designed around the pulse of city life. The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, published in the journal Lacerba in August 1914, is generally attributed to Sant'Elia, although some historians dispute his sole authorship. The Futurist movement more broadly glorified the machine age, speed and war, and several of its prominent figures, including Sant'Elia himself, were killed after volunteering to fight in the First World War, cutting the movement's architectural ambitions short before they could be built at scale.