italian futurism – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

Antonio Sant’ Elia, Architectural Drawings and Computer Realizations

On October 10, 1916, Antonio Sant’Elia died fighting Austro-Hungarian forces at the eighth Battle of the Isonzo near Monfalcone on the Adriatic coast. The Italian architect was just 28 years old and left behind only one completed building, his Villa Elisi in Brunate, outside of Como.

Anyone who has seen Fritz Lang’s classic silent film Metropolis (1927) or watched Harrison Ford hunt replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is already familiar with Sant’Elia’s imaginative vision of the city of the future. His fantastical designs inspired the visual worlds of those two films, and even today, 100 years after his death, the future he envisioned still resonates.

The work Sant’Elia is best known for—Città Nuova or “New City” in Italian—came with machine-like superstructures, stepped skyscrapers interlaced with suspended walkways and highway overpasses. Designed between 1912 and 1914, it was intended to be the architectural remedy to Modernism’s perceived disconnect from lived experience.

Sant’Elia believed that the primary task of a city in the industrial age should be to facilitate movement in the most efficient way possible. For his Città Nuova, he proposed three levels of traffic according to vehicle and speed: pedestrian overpasses, roads for cars, and tracks for tramways. These, along with vertical elevator shafts, were the only traffic arteries in the city. Sant’Elia also proposed that the city exist in a state of continuous construction. “We must invent and rebuild the…city,” he wrote. “It must be like an immense, tumultuous, lively, noble work site, dynamic in all its parts.”

Gino Severini, “War Train”, Oil on Linen, 1915, Museum of Modern Art, New York

This painting depicts a fast-moving train with soldiers shooting long, powerful guns. It is in the style of Futurism, an Italian modern movement that glorified technology, war, the dynamism of new objects, and the fast pace of urban life. It was founded by Marinetti, an Italian poet, and practiced by Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Severini.

WWI was raging on in Europe at this time and there was new military technology such as machine guns, chemical weapons, and cannons that were used to devastating effect. The painting has an aerial view, which reflects Severini’s Parisian studio that overlooked a train station. The fast movement of the train is broken down into flat, broad color planes that exemplify Cubism’s multiple perspectives seen simultaneously.

The smoke from the guns masks the background of ridged fields, which may hint at the destruction of the Italian countryside. The five shooters are a faceless, menacing, and threatening mass. There are also many interesting, specific details such as the rivets on the train and on the cannon.

“Armored Train” is similar to Francisco Goya’s “Third of May”, painted in1808, which shows a wall of unrecognizable oppressors shooting a defiant subject. However, unlike the Goya rendition, Severini’s painting has no identifiable victim; it’s just general chaos. Despite the violence, the colors are uplifting and the central line of composition thrusts upwards.