W
A Report
Presented to
The Academic Faculty, History Of Architecture By Mukesh Choudhary Narayan A of Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University July 2020
00 Contents
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Introduction Early Works Influnces on Antonio Sant’Elia Analyisis of Manifesto of Futuristic Architecture Città Nuova Sketches Fascism and Futuristic Architecture in Italy Artists and Architects Influnced by Futurist Movement Super Matism Zaha Hadid and Supermatism The Peak The Parametric Design Genealogy of Zaha Hadid Conclusion References
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Introduction Abstract The main goal of the report is the analysis and understand the ideology and impacts of the work of Antonio Sant’Elia , Futuristic Architecture Manifesto of 1914. In which he expressed his utopias but also his concrete ideas to change the way buildings were conceived, on present context.
About The Architect Antonio Sant’Elia (April 30th, 1888 - October 10th, 1916) was a very influential Italian architect. He was born in Como, Lombardy. A builder by training, he opened a design office in Milan in 1912 and became involved with the Futurist movement. Between 1912 and 1914, influenced by industrial cities of the United States and the Viennese architects Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, he began a series of design drawings for a futurist Città Nuova (“New City”) that was conceived as symbolic of a new age. Along with other members of the Futurists, Sant’Elia joined the Volunteer Cyclists Battalion of the Italian army when Italy entered World War I in 1915. Here, he took part in the conquest of Dosso Casina. After a brief period of recuperation, he re-joined his regiment and was also tasked with designing the war cemetery for the Brigade. On 10th October 1916 he was killed during the Eighth Battle of the Isonzo, near Gorizia, he was 28 years old. His body was buried in the cemetery which he had designed earlier in the year.
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A timeline of Antonio Sant’Elia’s life events
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Early Works
Villa Elisi (1912)
Villa Elisi
Villa Elisi was designed and built as a holiday home for the industrialist Romeo Longatti. The Villa, while small in size, features the asymmetrical, geometric designs seen in much of Sant’Elia’s work. The front has round stone features that wrap around the walls and the building was decorated with frescoes in the style of Gustav Klimt. These were created in conjunction with Sant’Elia’s friend Girolamo Fontana and this is a clear example of the influence of Austrian Secession styles on the architect. No other buildings designed by Sant’Elia were completed during his lifetime so this small villa gave some insight into how his drawings could be translated into reality and produce an aesthetically novel, but also functional building. The project also represented an opportunity for Sant’Elia to prove his worth in a range of roles, as he acted as site manager for the build. The Villa still stands but the painted decoration was removed during modern renovations.
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New Central Station of Milan, main facade
Nuova Stazione Centrale di Milano
In 1912 Sant’Elia collaborated with the architect Arrigo Cantoni to enter a competition to design the façade of the New Central Station building in Milan. It is believed that this design is Sant’Elia’s work, although there has been some suggestion that Cantoni may have been involved at a conceptual level. The frontage is crowned by a central dome and two smaller domes mark and accentuate the ends of the structure. Tall pillars and rectagular grids of windows line the majority of the building, with areas of sculptural decoration drawing the eye towards the central dome. The frontage also needed to fufil a practical function conveying passengers and lugagge from street level upwards to the level of the tracks. Sant’Elia incorporated large curved doorways across the design to allow an easy flow of people entering and exiting the building. The design incorporates large panels of glass and steel supported within a stone structure. This confident use of new materials shows Sant’Elia’s desire to include new ideas and technologies into his work and it was this forward-thinking that, later, attracted the Futurists to Sant’Elia. The design shows the influence of Otto Wagner, a pioneering Art Nouveau architect, on Sant’Elia, with the massive stone pillars and eagle decoration drawn from Wagner’s Stadtbahn scheme in Vienna (1899). Some of the sculptural elements also seem to have been inspired by Wagner’s Franz-Josefstadtmuseum (1902). The design can be seen as transistional, bringing together Art Nouveau details with bold new elements that are preemptive of interwar styles. The competition was ultimately won by architect Ulisse Stacchini.
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Influnces on Antonio Sant’Elia Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Italian writer and poet Filippo Marinetti was the ideological founder of Futurism, publishing his manifesto for the movement in Paris newspaper Le Figaro in 1909: “For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards”. The artistic movement rejected traditional forms and embraced the revolutionary possibility that technology could bring to culture, cities and modern living.
Zang Tumb Tumb , The first machine-made art book, F.T. Marinetti’s avant-garde poetry book
Marinetti’s words were bricks for a Modernism he wished others would build and the ideas took hold in his homeland, with painters, sculptors, musicians and architects such as Mario Chiattone and Sant’Elia adapting them into their work.
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Otto Wagner & Adolf Loos Drawing inspiration from the new industrial cities of the United States and from pioneering modernist architects such as Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, Sant’Elia started to complete a series of designs for a futuristic city called La Citta Nuova (The New City) featuring interconnecting skyscrapers, travel networks and skyline walkways. Many of these designs were displayed at an exhibition of the Nuove Tendenze (New Trends) group in May 1914. This brought Sant’Elia’s work to wider notice, particularly garnering the attention of the Futurists, an artistic movement, led by the writer Marinetti, which embraced technology and modern living along with violence, youth, and speed. Sant’Elia was encouraged to join the Futurists and his exhibition text from the Nuove Tendenze formed the basis of The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, that was distributed in August of 1914.
Otto Wagner
Adolf Loos
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Renzo Picasso Renzo Giovanni Battista Picasso, born in 1880 in Genoa, Italy, was clearly his own man. An inventor, engineer, and designer with a taste for the fantastical, his whimsical and weird ideas reflect what urbanists of a century ago envisioned as the American city of the future. While he had a great love of Genoa, Picasso was truly a “world citizen.� He spent much of his time traveling and exploring the great cities of Europe and America. Upon visiting New York City in 1911, he was deeply impressed by the urbanism and technical innovation of modern American architecture. Deviating from the more conservative styles of his father and grandfather, he produced a large number of visionary drawings and plans depicting the most striking aspects of what he saw, such as skyscrapers, elevators, public transports, and urban plans.
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Manifesto of Futuristic Architecture
ORIGINAL PAPERS of Antonio Sant’Elia
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Analysis of Manifesto of Futuristic Architecture
Philosophy & Ideas
• The new beauty of cement and iron is profaned by the superimposition of carnivalesque decorative encrustations that are justified neither by structural necessity nor by our tastes, encrustations that take their origins from Egyptian, Byzantine, or Indian antiquities, or from that stupefying efflorescence of idiocy and impotence that has taken the name of neo- classicism. • Thus, in their hands, this expressive and synthetic art has become a stylistic exercise, a rummaging through a hotchpotch of old formulas meant to disguise the usual passéist sleight- of-hand in brick and stone as a modern building. As if we, accumulators and generators of movement, with all our mechanical extensions of ourselves, with all the noise and speed of our lives, could ever live in the same houses and streets constructed to meet the needs of men who lived four, five, or six centuries ago. • He declared that architecture must begin again from the beginning. • He called for an architecture of new materials, without ornament or decoration, and an architecture of oblique and elliptical lines.
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Philosophy & Ideas
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He abandons the traditional architectural presentation forms plan and elevation and the emphasis on construction details and relies entirely on perspective drawings because they allowed him to convey the atmosphere of urban dynamism.
• Everything must be revolutionized • Roofs and underground spaces must be used • The importance of the façade must be diminished • Issues of taste must be transplanted from the field of fussy moldings, finicky capitals and flimsy doorways to the broader concerns of bold groupings and masses, and large-scale disposition of planes • Putting an end of monumental, funereal and • commemorative architecture. • Overturning monuments, pavements, arcades and flights of steps. • Raising the level of the city.
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Critic on Classical Architecture
No architecture has existed since 1700. A moronic mixture of the most various stylistic elements used to mask the skeletons of modern houses is called modern architecture. The new beauty of cement and iron are profaned by the superimposition of motley decorative incrustations that cannot be justified either by constructive necessity or by our (modern) taste, and whose origins are in Egyptian, Indian or Byzantine antiquity and in that idiotic flowering of stupidity and impotence that took the name of neoclassicism. Young Italian architects (those who borrow originality from clandestine and compulsive devouring of art journals) flaunt their talents in the new quarters of our towns, where a hilarious salad of little ogival columns, seventeenthcentury foliation, Gothic pointed arches, Egyptian pilasters, Rococo scrolls, fifteenth-century cherubs, swollen Wcaryatids, take the place of style in all seriousness, and presumptuously put on monumental airs. The decorative must be abolished. The problem of Futurist architecture must be resolved, not by continuing to pilfer from Chinese, Persian or Japanese photographs or fooling around with the rules of Vitruvius, but through flashes of genius and through scientific and technical expertise.
Translation from the original Manifesto of Futurist Architecture - 1914
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Citta Nuova • Sant’Elia proposed a vision of a Modern city that took the form of a “gigantic machine.” Central to his Citta Nuova concept is the electrifying dynamism championed by his futurist contemporaries. Sant’Elia embraced the ideal of motion and activity. Some components of Sant’Elia’s futuristic city- City • The obsession with circulation: A striking aspect of Sant’Elia’s design is his de-emphasis on the autonomy of buildings.That is, his design choices for the Citta Nuova implicitly reflect on the futurist philosophy of beauty in motion, and correspondingly seek to promote the unfettered circulation of objects – people, automobiles, trains, etc.
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Modern Building - 1913
Modern Building - 1913
SKETCHES ( 1913-1914 )
Modern Building - 1913
Setback High Rise -1914
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Kiosk - 1914
Church - 1913-14
Station for Airplanes and Trains with Funiculars and Elevators on Three Street Levels - 1914
High-Rise Building - 1914
Power Station - 1914
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Electric Power Plant - 1914
Monumental Power Station - 1914 Power Station - 1914
Power Station - 1914
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Study for a Monument - 1914
Monumental Building Inspired by a Roman Gateway - 1914
Study for a Church - 1915
Study for a Church- 1914
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Power Station - 1914
Church - 1913-14
Church - 1914
Study for an Electric Power Station - 1914
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Fascism and Futuristic Architecture Futurist architecture emerged in the early-20th century in Italy. It was motivated by anti-historicism and characterised by long horizontal lines and streamlined forms suggesting speed, dynamism, movement and urgency. Architects became involved in the artistic movement known as ‘futurism’ which was founded by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti with his ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), along with other creatives such as writers, musicians, artists, and so on Utopian visions for futurist cities (see top image) were proposed by architects Mario Chiattone and Antonio Sant’Elia, which emphasised the use of new materials and industrial methods, as well as new developments such as elevators and structural steel components. Futurist architecture came to be characterised by the notion of movement and flow, with sharp edges, strange angles, triangles, domes, and so on. In many respects, the more defined styles of Art Deco and Art Moderne adopted Futurist ideas of design and form, which were thought to be limitless in scope and scale. In early 1918 he founded the Partito Politico Futurista or Futurist Political Party, which only a year later merged with Benito Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. Marinetti was one of the first affiliates of the Italian Fascist Party.
The massive artwork titled Sintesis Fascista ( Fascist Synthesis) by Alessandro Bruschetti shows how italian futurist artists cheered on Mussolinni and his fascist plans - 1935
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Artists and Architects Influnced by Futurist Movement John Portman
THE ARCHITECT and developer John Portman is best known for building destination points for cities that no longer had urban centers, such as Atlanta’s Peachtree Center (1976) and Detroit’s Renaissance Center (1977). His 54-story, Hshaped concrete slab is the closest thing New York has to the forbidding but interesting projects of the Italian futurist architects Antonio Sant’Elia and Mario Chiattone, with multistoried blind walls. The building is situated in the bow tie of Times Square and epitomizes an era of urban planning. Although it is thoroughly un-New York in character, the building is fascinatingly effective taken on its own terms.
Marriott Marquis hotel in Georgia by John Portman
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Helmut Jahn’s James R. Thompson Center, formerly the State of Illinois Center, opened in Chicago’s North Loop in 1985. The seventeen-story structure contains 1.1 million square feet and is distinguished by a curving, reflective facade and full-height, 160-foot-diameter public atrium. A state office building and hub for government services, the Center houses tenants including the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Illinois Court of Claims. The Center is also the Chicago District Office of the governor of Illinois—the capital of Illinois is located in Springfield, a city of approximately 115,000 people two hundred miles southwest of Chicago—and the offices of agencies such as the Illinois State Board of Education.
ATRRIUM of State of Illinois Center
Helmut Jahn
Section and sketch of State of Illinois Center by Helmut Jahn
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Kazimir Malevich Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) was a Russian painter and designer who is mostly known for his abstract style which he named Suprematism. He worked in many styles but this one was his most famous as it was a formation of the Russian avant-garde post WWI style. His style concentrated on exploring geometric forms and their relationship with each other within a space. His Suprematist compositions were formed of flat areas of colour (usually oil paint) that he layered in order to create feelings of floating, falling, ascending, time and space. Malevich had an interest in architecture and when he began to translate Suprematism into three dimensions he made architectural models from plaster that he called Architectons.
Photograph of an Arkhitekton, 1924
Self-Portrait - Kazimir Malevich- 1933
Suprematism, Museum of Art, Krasnodar 1916
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SUPERMATISM Antonio Sant’Elia wanted the modern city to be a living, functioning organism; built with dynamism, speed, straight lines, with the man and machine at its heart. Although people do not feature in his drawings to give a sense of scale or society (“Futurist architecture . . . is not an arid combination of practicality and utility, but remains art, that is, synthesis and expression”, he wrote), many of the designs give a feeling of activity and existence. We can imagine the commotion among the calm construction. These futurist ideas travelled as far as Russia, influencing Vladimir Mayakovsky and Kazimir Malevich, among others. But the movement lost credibility when Marinetti began to couple Fascism with the movement. He became a vocal supporter of Benito Mussolini, and continued to glorify the idea of war.
Dynamic Suprematism Supremus 57 - 1915
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“Suprematism was an art movement, focused on basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines, and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colors. It was founded by Kazimir Malevich in Russia, around 1913, and announced in Malevich’s 1915 exhibition in St. Petersburg where he exhibited 36 works in a similar style. The term suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” rather than on visual depiction of objects.” . In “Suprematism” (Part II of his book The Non-Objective World, which was published 1927 in Munich as Bauhaus Book No. 11), Malevich clearly stated the core concept of Suprematism: “Under Suprematism I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.”
Супрематизм Suprematism, oil on canvas, 1915 Russian Museum
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ZAHA HADID AND SUPERMATISM Architects can be considerably influenced by other architects or painters in their work, for example, Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich had a massive influence on the Modernist architect, Zaha Hadid. Zaha Hadid ( 1950-2016) is an Iraqi-British architect, the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize in 2004. She received an excellent education and studied architecture at the Architectural Association (AA) in London. Zaha Hadid became interested in Kazimir Malevich’s work in 1970 when she was a student at the AA. She was obsessed with Malevich’s work and the influence from Suprematism has spanned her whole career. Hadid’s graduation project from the AA was based on Malevich’s influence, she called it Malevich’s Tektonik (1976-77). What fascinated her about the piece was the complete abstraction which inspired her to move away from certain dogmas within architecture. The project liberated and freed her from these rules leading her to abstract plans and be more expressive within her designs. The task was to find a scale and urban site for Malevich’s sculpture Architekton Alpha (1920) to create architecture. She “wanted to explore the ‘mutation’ factor for the programme requirements of a hotel on the Hungerford Bridge over the Thames. The horizontal ‘tektonik’ conforms to and makes use of the apparently random composition of Suprematist forms to meet the demands of the programme and the site”. (Betsky, 2009). Her painting for this project uses minimal colour, like Malevich did in his paintings. The main tektonik is the three dimensional object in the middle of the piece, it includes shadows. The tektonik has been fragmented and broken down, pivoting around the site before it landed. The surrounding shapes are plan views and aerial views which have been inspired by Malevich’s block colours and fragmentation.
Malevich’s Tektonik. Painting by Zaha Hadid.
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Malevich used a number of forms that did not have exact proportions. Whereas Hadid’s preferred scale is quite large but the fragmentation element between them both is still similar. Malevich’s used forms with straighter edges and angular edges; the triangle, the square and the cross. Hadid uses these forms but she was also very fond of the complex circular and curvaceous shapes.
Vitra fire station Painting by Zaha Hadid.
A result of Zaha Hadid’s interest in Malevich was her decision to incorporate painting within her early career as a design tool. She found the traditional way of representing architecture limiting and a way searching for new ways to express her ideas and concepts.In terms of spatial composition, Hadid’s work is close to Malevich’s work. The use of empty spaces and experimentation of scale.
Zaha Hadid, ‘London 2066 for British Vogue’, 1991
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Breakthrough Project
Painting, The Peak, Exploded Isometric, Hong Kong, Zaha Hadid, 1982-83
Peak Slabs Black, The Peak Project, Hong Kong, 1982-1983
This painting depicts Hadid’s winning entry in an architectural competition for a private club in the hills of Kowloon, Hong Kong. Hadid proposed to transform the site by excavating the hills, using the removed rock to build artificial cliffs, or “a man-made geology,” in her words. Into this new topography she planned to interject cantilevered beams, shard-like fragments, and other elements that would seem to splinter the structure into its myriad constituent parts, as if subjecting it to some powerful, destabilizing force. The forms appear to hover and float, defying gravity. Though never built, The Peak is considered to be Hadid’s breakthrough project and a pivotal moment in her investigation of painting as a design tool. Hadid often referred to the lasting impact that Russian Suprematist painters, and in particular Kazimir Malevich, the founding figure of the movement, had on her work. Pushing the traditional boundaries of architectural representation, Hadid’s early paintings and drawings explore the potential of dynamism and distortion by superimposing sharp planar elements and overlaying multiple perspectives.
The Peak – Hong Kong, China, Blue Slabs Acrylic on canvas 1983
THE PEAK
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Overall Isometric, Day View
Overall Isometric,Night view
The Parametric Design Genealogy of Zaha Hadid Kazimir Malevich – a pioneer who created Suprematism, destroyed a dogma that for centuries defined the “man-function-form-structureobject-space” system, in which the components depended on each other, brought confusion and chaos in thoughts and rationales of the architecture of the Vitruvian laws.
Adaptation of Suprematism to Deconstructivism, and then into technocratic Parametricism and further into organic chaoticism became the architectural method of Zaha Hadid and the initial practical example of Parametricism in architecture Recently Zaha Hadid settled Parametricism as her design paradigm and embodies its key feature with Patrick Schumacher, her practice partner Even though Hadid has been employing the varying perception of the observer’s view as well as the Gestalt effect that comprises the foundation of Parametricism as a consistent design paradigm, we can also find evolution in parametric methodology. In her early works Hadid utilized either varying perception of geometry per the observer’s view or the figure-ground relationship in one project, not simultaneously. This is opposed to her recent work which aims to show both concurrently within Parametric urbanism in which articulations of buildings extend to the landscape beyond and even the urban fabric, or vice versa. Her early work did not combine ambient parameters and the observer parameter, which resulted in a restrictive Parametricism. Recent work, however, integrates both into one system, Parametric urbanism, which sets up correlations from urban distribution to architectural morphology, detailed tectonic articulation and interior organization. In addition, Hadid now utilizes “nonobjective” curvilinear shapes rather than the rigid geometry of her early work, maximizing the figureground effect Though this study is based on a limited number of works by Hadid and Malevich, her inspiration from Malevich’s Suprematism and CuboFuturism and its observer and ambient parameters are found consistently within the evolutionary paradigm of her design genealogy, leading to Parametricism
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Conclusion
ANTONIO SANT’ELIA had the briefest of architectural careers: he was born in 1888, began to work as a draftsman in 1907 and was killed while fighting in World War I in 1916. He left behind almost no completed works of architecture, yet he is one of the most compelling figures modern architecture has ever produced. Sant’Elia made his mark through drawing - in his short, intense career he created a vision of the possibilities of modern architecture that surely stands as the high point of the Italian Futurist imagination. Sant’Elia’s drawings, many of which are only a few inches square and the largest of which is but two feet wide, are sketches of extraordinary power and grace. Together, they give us a picture of modernism as an energizing, yet benign, force; they suggest a new world of mountainous buildings in which bridges and towers leap over space.
Through the events of time, the idea of the futuristic cities in his manifesto has inspired many artists and architects. This influenced many great art forms and styles such as SUPREMATISM, which further translated into Zaha Hadid’s paintings and ideology for radicalizing the very definition of what architecture could be, which links to ANTONIO SANT’ELIA’s City Novve and his theory of architecture
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References
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http://architectuul.com/architect/antonio-sant-elia https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/santelias-words/ http://www.renzopicasso.com/ingegner-renzo-picasso/ https://atkinson-and-company.co.uk/blog/2017/03/09/santelia/ https://images.lib.ncsu.edu/luna/servlet/view/all/when/Futurist?res=2&showAll=who&os=100 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/1-56898-652-1_66 https://averyreview.com/issues/issue-19/aesthetics-of-postmodern-citizenship https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/filippo-tommaso-marinettizang-tumb-tumb/ https://www.booksontrial.com/was-futurism-proto-fascism/ https://circuitboardcityblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/18/the-relationship-between-fine-art-and-architecture-kazimir-malevich-and-zaha-hadid/ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3130/jaabe.14.403 https://academicjournal.ru/images/PDF/2019/Academy-7-46/parametric-randomness.pdf https://www.zaha-hadid.com/ https://www.bmiaa.com/antonio-santelia-1888-1916-the-future-of-cities-atpalazzo-della-triennale/ https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-and-property/interiors/ the-futurist-world-of-architect-antonio-sant-elia-1.2569429 https://www.booksontrial.com/mussolini-and-marinetti-a-timeline-of-the-futurist-fascist-alliance/ http://socks-studio.com/2015/07/15/kazimir-malevichs-arkhitektons/ https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/centenary-death-antonio-santelia-1888-1916 https://www.italianways.com/antonio-santelias-city-of-the-future/ https://www.elledecor.com/it/best-of/a20657884/antonio-sant-elia-futurist-architect-eng/ https://www.abc.net.au/cm/lb/4285602/data/manifesto-of-futurist-architecture-data.pdf https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-and-property/interiors/ the-futurist-world-of-architect-antonio-sant-elia-1.2569429 https://www.readingdesign.org/manifesto-futurist https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-19428-4_4
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Let us overturn monuments, pavements, arcades and flights of steps; Let us sink the streets and squares; Let us raise the level of the city.