Futurist Architecture Manifesto

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The Futurist Architecture Manifesto was a document that was written in order to portray its style and message. It was thought to have been published in 1914 by Antonio Sant’Elia, who was a very influential architect of the futurist movement. Sant’Elia joined the movement while he was working as a builder in his design office. He drew concepts of his Città Nuov, which means “New City”, to represent his perceptions of the future era. These were displayed at a May/June 1914 exhibition of a faction he belonged to: the Nuove Tendenze. However, his work was undersized by the First World War; he joined it as Italy entered, and died during the Battles of the Isonzo. His published designs were still able to influence many people including architects, artists and designers. This epoch of design was due to the ill feeling of the previous architecture; stagnation of the former structures was a main cause of the Futurist Movement. One of the arguments claimed the clinging nature to ancient architecture was simply a masquerade to veil the new building materials such as iron and concrete, “justified neither by structural necessity nor by our taste” (Sant’Elia/ Marinetti, 34). The backwards moving designs were ravenously constructed by young Italian architects causing a strange mixture of endless antiquities with descriptions such as “a joyful confusion of ogival columns seventeenth-century foliage. Gothic arches…”(Sant’Elia/ Marinetti, 35). Wanting to break away from the older generation models that exposed themselves as ‘neo-classicism’ the Futurist Movement was an arrangement to not incorporate the dated architecture, but to instead use the technologies available to them to improve and not adhere to the former unfashionable tastes, describing its goals as “not a question of finding new profiles, new doors, and window frames, substituting for columns, pilasters, consoles
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