Architecture

The architect Antonio Sant’Elia joined the futurist movement relatively late and rather hesitantly in 1914. His perspective drawings of a modern city originated from before the “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture” (1914), which summarised the theoretical ideas of futurist architecture without really addressing the illustrated drafts by Sant’Elia. The architect’s vast buildings emphasised the horizontal and vertical aspects, while the manifesto preached the use of oblique and elliptical lines to express dynamism. However, they shared an enthusiasm for modernity and progress. Of note were the lifts, which were always placed on the exterior façade, and the three levels for different types of road users. Sant’Elia was killed in 1916 and was honoured as a hero of the war and of Futurism, he can be considered as the most famous architect in the movement. Virgilio Marchi did not join the futurist group before 1916. His drafts, such as the interior of the bar of the “Casa Bragaglia” in Rome pictured here, departed from Sant’Elia’s architectural visions and availed themselves of the dynamics of curves and of the “energy lines” (linee forza) instead. In his illustrated book “Architettura futurista” (1924), Marchi put on the record his version of architectural aesthetics, which was already approaching abstraction in some points.