FUTURIST ARCHITECTS SHUBHAM SISODIYA SY M.ARCH (2020-21)
ANTONIO SANT'ELIA
HISTORY • •
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Antonio Sant'Elia ( 30 April 1888 – 10 October 1916) was an Italian architect. Notable for his visionary drawings of the city of the future. In 1912 he began practicing architecture in Milan, where he became involved with the Futurist movement. Between 1912 and 1914 he made many highly imaginative drawings and plans for cities of the future. A group of these drawings called Citta Nuova (“New City”) was displayed in May 1914 at an exhibition of the Nuove Tendenze group, of which he was a member. Sant’Elia volunteered for army duty shortly after the outbreak of World War I, and he died in the battle of Monfalcone. He was a key member of the Futurist movement in architecture. He left behind almost no completed works of architecture and is primarily remembered for his bold sketches and influence on modern architecture. Between 1912 and 1914, influenced by industrial cities of the United States and the architects Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, and the Genoese architect Renzo Picasso, he began a series of design drawings for a futurist Citta Nuova ("New City") that was conceived as a symbol of a new age
CITTA NUOVA “NEW CITY” •
Sant’Elia proposed a vision of a Modern city that took the form of a “gigantic machine.”
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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: •
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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In “La Citta Nuova, detail” (above) Sant’Elia demonstrates this concept by converging the various channels of transportation – glass and metal walkways, highways and railways – at various heights near the base of the structure.
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Traffic channels penetrate everywhere, and are the only structures that have been determined.
CITTA NUOVA “NEW CITY”
“Citta Nuova”, Sant'Elia’s Sketch House with external elevators
“Citta Nuova”, Rendered
CITTA NUOVA “NEW CITY”
“Citta Nuova”, Sant'Elia’s Sketch
“Citta Nuova”, Rendered
HIS IDEAS •
He declared that architecture must begin again from the beginning.
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He called for an architecture of new materials, without ornament or decoration, and an architecture of oblique and elliptical lines.
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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.
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The problem of futurist architecture must be resolved, not by continuing to steal from Chinese, Persian or Japanese photographs or fooling around with the rules of vitruvius, but through flashes of genius and through scientific and technical experience.
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Everything must be revolutionized
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Roofs and underground spaces must be used
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The importance of the façade must be diminished
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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
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Putting an end of monumental, funereal and commemorative architecture.
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Overturning monuments, pavements, arcades and flights of steps.
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Raising the level of the city.
Power Station
HIS PHILOSOPHY •
Architecture has not existed since the year 700. A foolish motley of the most heterogeneous elements of style, used only to mask the skeleton of the modern house, goes under the name of modern architecture. 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.
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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 passeist 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.
HIS PHILOSOPHY •
The problem of futurist architecture is not a problem of rearranging its lines. It is not a question of finding new moldings, new architraves for windows and doors; nor of replacing columns pilasters, and corbels with caryatids, hornets, and frogs; not a question of leaving a façade bare brick or facing it with plaster or stone; it has nothing to do with defining formalistic differences between new buildings and old ones; but with raising the futurist house on a healthy plan, gleaning every benefit of science and technology, nobly settling every demand of our habits and minds, rejecting all that is grotesque, heavy, and antithetical to our being (tradition, style, aesthetics, proportion), establishing new forms, new lines, new harmonies for profiles and volumes.Â
SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTRE •
He was a key member of the Futurist movement in architecture.
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Antonio Sant’Elia was the primary driving force behind Futurist architecture.
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Antonio Sant'Elia wrote the official Manifesto of Futurist Architecture in 1914.The published manifesto was primarily a consolidation and editing of ideas previously developed in Messaggio, a document that was also written by Sant'Elia.
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The Futurist movement existed as a distinct entity from 1909 – 1944
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characterized by strong chromaticism, long dynamic lines, suggesting speed, motion, urgency and lyricism.
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The Futurists were interested in anything new and anything having to do with technology. In addition to their obsession with new things they were equally interested in a complete disposal of the past.
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This combination of interests drew the Futurists heavily to the hustle and bustle of city life. As such it would make sense that some of the Futurists had ideas for improving upon their choice living area.
SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTRE •
With this decoupling from the past the Futurists fully embraced any new technologies they could get their hands on. Not only did they want new materials to be used in their new designs they did not want the new materials to go anywhere near design themes from the past. The manifesto states that usage of new materials in the construction of buildings with historical designs desecrates the materials.
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Architecture is constructed of degradable materials ensuring that nothing would endure past a single generation. This degrading architecture effectively makes each generation responsible for the construction of their towns and cities.
MANIFESTO OF ARCHITECTRE •
The drawings Antonio Sant’Elia included in his August 1914 Futurist Manifesto of Architecture are, perhaps, the most famous and influential of the early 20th century, predating many of the avant-garde designs of architects in Germany, France, Holland, and Russia, made a few years later.
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They are certainly the first by a European architect to project a vertical city, one composed not only of towers, but also of stacked layers of streets, plazas, and the mechanical movement of cars, trams, and trains.
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By publishing the drawings with the Manifesto, Sant’Elia himself was inviting comparisons between his words and architectural designs. When we make them, we find both thrilling conjunctions and puzzling contradictions.
MANIFESTO OF ARCHITECTRE •
For example:
“We must invent and rebuild the Futurist city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail; and the Futurist house must be like a gigantic machine. The lifts must no longer be hidden away like tapeworms in the niches of stairwells; the stairwells themselves, rendered useless, must be abolished, and the lifts must scale the lengths of the façades like serpents of steel and glass. The house of concrete, glass and steel, stripped of paintings and sculpture, rich only in the innate beauty of its lines and relief, extraordinarily “ugly” in its mechanical simplicity, higher and wider according to need rather than the specifications of municipal laws. It must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many stories down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan traffic, and will be linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements.”
CITTA NUOVA “NEW CITY”
CITTA NUOVA “NEW CITY”
HIS INFLUENCE •
Most of his works were never built, but he influenced many late architects; as John Portman , a neofuturistic architect ,as in “James R. Thompson Center” and Helmut Jahn, a German- American architect, as in “The Marriott Marquis hotel in Georgia”
The Marriott Marquis Hotel, by Helmut Jahn
James R. Thompson Center, by John Portman
HIS SKETCHES He translated his ideas into a series of drawings known as “Architecture Dynamisms�, in which pyramids, buttresses, towers, churches, monumental factories and stepped palaces, complete with external elevators and surrounded by multilevel streets, represent different facets of his ideal metropolis of the future.
RICHARD BUCKMINSTER FULLER
ABOUT FULLER •
Richard Buckminster fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "spaceship earth", "dymaxion" house/car, ephemeralization, synergetic, and "tensegrity".
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He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome.
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Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres.
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Fuller was the second world president of mensa from 1974 to 1983.
ABOUT FULLER •
Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews, and grand-nephew of Margaret Fuller, an American
journalist,
critic,
and women's
rights advocate
associated
with
the
American transcendentalism movement. The unusual middle name, Buckminster, was an ancestral family name. •
He disagreed with the way geometry was taught in school, being unable to experience for himself that a chalk dot on the blackboard represented an "empty" mathematical point, or that a line could stretch off to infinity.
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To him these were illogical, and led to his work on synergetics. He often made items from materials he found in the woods, and sometimes made his own tools.
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He experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats. By age 12, he had invented a 'push pull' system for propelling a rowboat by use of an inverted umbrella connected to the transom with a simple oar lock which allowed the user to face forward to point the boat toward its destination. Later in life, Fuller took exception to the term "invention".
FULLER’S INFLUENCE Global Thinking •
Buckminster Fuller was one of our world’s first futurists and global thinkers.
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His headquarters, the “Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs,” contained the findings of his extensive global research.
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Beginning in the 30s, Fuller correlated this data and made a number of important and accurate predictions about the future of our society.
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His work in this regard paved the way for contemporary trend watchers like Tom Peters, John Naisbitt, and Alvin Toffler. Fuller developed the Inventory as a database for his World Game™, which uses a large-scale Dymaxion™ Map of the world for displaying world resources, and allows players to strategize solutions to global problems, matching human needs with resources.
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Fuller’s Dymaxion Map was the first world projection to show the continents on a flat surface without visible distortion. The Dymaxion Map allows percentages of resources and population to be displayed accurately.
FULLER’S INFLUENCE Solutions To Global Problems • From the moment of his 1927 decision to make his life an experiment in individual initiative, Fuller addressed himself to the largest questions he could formulate. • He sought to discover what it would take to “make the world work”—that is, to provide adequate food, energy, and shelter for 100% of humanity to enjoy a high standard of living. • As part of this research, Fuller made an assessment of global food production and distribution that led to his 1959 prediction of the conquest of poverty by the year 2000. • Nearly twenty years later, in 1977, the National Academy of Sciences confirmed his prediction. Other aspects of his research led Fuller to be one of the earliest proponents of renewable energy sources. • His extensive energy research documented that we can produce enough energy for everybody in the world while phasing out all use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. • While the end of poverty may still seem like a distant possibility, Fuller and the National Academy both agreed that the resources and technology to end the worst aspects of homelessness, disease, and malnutrition are available —the only thing lacking has been the social and political will to make physical success for all humanity a reality.
FULLER’S INFLUENCE Synergy •
The word synergy is now prevalent in our society, as the name for everything from business consulting firms to tennis shoes—so much so that the word has nearly lost its meaning.
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But before Fuller’s popularization of the term through his lectures and writings, synergy was confined almost exclusively to chemical laboratories.
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Fuller was a leading proponent of bringing the word into popular usage, because he found that it is a basic principle of interactive systems.
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The synergetic approach pioneered by Fuller has influenced many aspects of society, including the rise of “holism”—in health care, psychology, problem-solving, planning, thinking, and systems design.
THE GEODESIC DOME • Fuller is perhaps best known as the inventor of the Geodesic Dome, the lightest, strongest, most cost-effective structure ever devised. •
There are now over 300,000 domes in the world, some of them the centerpieces of major world exhibits: Epcot Center at Disney World in Florida (housing the exhibit called “Spaceship Earth”); the U. S. Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair; the largest clear-span structure in the world that covers Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose in Long Beach Harbor.
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Adopted by the U.S. Marine Corps as “the first basic improvement in mobile military shelter in 2,600 years” geodesic domes are used as “radomes” to house delicate radar equipment in the Arctic, withstanding 180 mph winds.
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Fuller designed the geodesic dome and other industrially-produced housing prototypes to counter the trend toward resource-intensive, prohibitively expensive housing, part of his design to make adequate shelter available to 100% of humanity.
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His structural designs were explorations in providing solutions to global homelessness, both for inner city slums and the rural poor.
RECENT SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS • While scientists have known since the fifties that the structures of many viruses are geodesic and extraordinarily stable, new scientific discoveries have revealed a class of carbon molecules that have been dubbed buckminsterfullerene's because of their geodesic sphere shape. •
Not surprisingly, they too are incredibly stable.
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Some scientists believe that fullerenes may turn out to be the most prevalent and the oldest molecules in the universe, validating the mathematical geometry that Fuller developed and called Synergetic.
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Also recently discovered, quasicrystals exhibit a geodesic structure that defies conventional models of crystalline materials.
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The applications of both quasicrystals and fullerenes, including implications in superconductivity, are only beginning to be developed, and the excitement and activity in the scientific community continue to accelerate.
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Fuller’s associates are pleased that these new discoveries are beginning to reveal the importance that his work will have in the scientific community.
EDUCTION INFLUENCE •
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The influence of Fuller’s message has been felt throughout the world. He has lectured to thousands of audiences, many as large as several thousand people, including consulting to world leaders like Indira Ghandi and Pierre Trudeau. He was invited to speak at major corporations like IBM and DuPont, as well as at over 500 educational institutions around the world. He authored 28 books that cumulatively have sold well over a million copies. Although Fuller never graduated from college, he was awarded nearly 50 honorary doctorates for his work in science and the humanities, and over 100 major awards of merit, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian award. By 1980, there were 90,000 published references to Fuller and his work through print and electronic media, including the cover of Time magazine in 1964. Through his extensive documentation of his experiment and its results, Fuller compiled data that indicated that by 1974, approximately one-quarter of a billion people had come into contact with some part of his work.
“MAKING A DIFFERENCE” •
It is easy to imagine that when Fuller began his experiment in 1927 very few people were talking about the individual’s ability to “make the world work,” yet he made that premise central to his entire life’s work.
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While it would be impossible to identify a direct connection between Fuller’s work and the changes taking place throughout the world, it is easy to see that this basic notion is cropping up everywhere.
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Today, just 50 years after the beginning of his experiment, we see the phrase “making a difference” just about everywhere—in corporate, commercial, social, and personal communications.
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This new orientation in our society holds that the actions of the individual can and do create positive social change, and books such as Earth Works Group’s 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save the Earth, that hold the effectiveness of individual initiative as a central premise, are best-sellers.
How future-proof are the ideas of Buckminster Fuller? •
A new appreciation of design guru Buckminster Fuller shows how he shaped a world that now manages to see him as both quaint and challenging
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In 1927 the suicidal manager of a building materials company, Richard Buckminster (“Bucky”) Fuller, stood by the shores of Lake Michigan and decided he might as well live.
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A stern voice inside him intimated that his life after all had a purpose, “which could be felled only by sharing his mind with the world”.
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And share it he did, tirelessly for over half a century, with houses hung from masts, cars with ignitable wings, a brilliant and never bettered equal-area map of the world, and concepts for massive open-access distance learning, domed cities and a new kind of playful, collaborative politics.
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The tsunami that Fuller’s wing set in motion is even now rolling over us, improving our future through degree shows, galleries, museums and (now and again) in the real world.
EIGHT OF BUCKMINSTER FULLER'S MOST FORWARD THINKING IDEAS
The Watercraft Rowing Needle, 1968
The Dymaxion Map, 1943
The Geodesic Dome, 1954
The Dymaxion Car, 1933 The Dymaxion Houses, 1927
KENZO TANGE
TOKYO BAY - KENZO TANGE •
Kenzo Tange ‘ 1960 plan for Tokyo was proposed at a time when many cities in the industrial world were experiencing the height of urban sprawl.
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With a unique insight into the emerging characteristics of the contemporary city and an optimistic faith in the power of design, Tange attempted to impose a new physical order on Tokyo, which would accommodate the city’s continued expansion and internal regeneration.
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The scheme, featuring a linear series of interlocking loops expanding Tokyo across the bay, has. often been regarded as initiating the decadelong mega-structural movement. Its theoretical contribution to contemporary urbanism, however, remains understudied.
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Tange incorporated urban concepts such as mobility, urban structure, linear civic axis, and city as process into a powerful architectural language and tried to elevate them to a new notion of the relationship between the whole and the part, and between the permanent and the transient
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However, Tange’s approached to these concepts was symbolic rather than practical, an orientation also manifest in his later works. His vision for establishing a new spatial order for the continuously expanding and transforming metropolis was ultimately a utopian ideal.
In the past, people walked along streets until they came to their destination and then simply disappeared into the door. With automobiles on the street, however, everything is different. In the first place, it is necessary to divide pedestrians from vehicles, to create highways and streets that are for the exclusive use of vehicles. Thanks to the coming of the automobile, there is need for a new order in which a vehicle can move from a fast highway to a slower one and then come to a stop at the destination. -Kenzo Tange
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Details of the model. Kenzo Tange. This huge fleet of units up to 300 m wide, with roofs like Japanese temples that seemed to be floating in the water, contained the residences.
Hotomontage and model. Kenzo Tange. The huge monumental axis built across the Tokyo Bay was designed for cars, keeping pedestrians away in separate areas through a hierarchy of expressways. The proposal differed from the ideas of CIAM, which was in favor of "urban centers" and proposed "civic areas“ instead.
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Tange’s organization consisted of a linear spine-like element made of layered systems of intersecting infrastructural cycles on different scales, which extended from Tokyo center, eighteen kilometers across Tokyo Bay, in the form of a ‘civic axis’ as he called it.
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Tange had conducted several city plans over the postwar years in the spirit of reconstruction. However, the background to this plan was that through rapid industrialization, Tokyo city was at the time already on the verge of having ten million inhabitants, experiencing an immense physical investment, and expecting a tremendous alteration of the cityscape.
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This meant the organization of new communication systems was a significant challenge. They would become, in fact, the most central element in a growing metropolis where mobility was one of the basic individual necessities.
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Tange would discuss communication henceforth in terms of a characteristic of an open society and as a means for change.
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As a consequence, Tange thought, it was essential to reflect on the nature of urban structures that would permit growth and change. Biological processes became the overall metaphor for managing the new development.
Aerial View Of Tokyo Bay