Antonio Sant'Elia influence on the following architecture movements, movies and videogames (original) (raw)

The Italian Architect Antonio Sant’Elia is considered the father of Futurist Architecture, the one who envisioned the future of cities on the basis of the native population’s work culture and habitual traits. It has been a century since his ideas were introduced in his ‘L-Architettura Futurista - Manifesto’ and later circulated by F.T. Marinetti, today they are making a prodigious impact on the architecture style of the entire world. His revolutionary ideas percolated through the murky aftermath of 19th & 20th century art movements. His out-worldly pre-modernist principles gave rise to the notion of exclusive habitats for generations and started the post-war trend of housing typologies as an industrialized and fast track medium of creating ample habitats. This review paper outlines the ideas and design theory of Antonio Sant’Elia through the advancements and achievements of the 20th & 21st century architects and their significant difference with the rest of historical architecture along with identification of elements of futurist principles in different architectural movements. The paper also makes a deliberate attempt to establish a timeline of developments within the said premise for futurist architecture.

The 21 st century is known for globalisation and rapid transformations in technology. These transformations also affect architecture and the urban environment. Developing projections for the future of architecture is becoming more critical in this era, where the opportunities to adapt to rapid transformations are scarce. This study investigates how to develop future perspectives for the 21 st century. Utopian speculations in the historical process and the 20 th century's Futurism movement were examined in this regard. A collective and multi-future methodology has been developed as a unique approach. In this paper, a multifuture experimental study was conducted as a daily workshop. In the workshop, seven architecture students from various universities and different architectural education years studied possible future scenarios for Beşiktaş Fish Market. Students were tasked to produce designs in compliance with the chronological timeline of the future for the possible transformation of the Beşiktaş Fish Market. The market, designed by Gökhan Avcıoğlu and GAD in 2009, was accorded the 2012 International Architecture Award and 2014 Archmarathon Crowd. In light of the outcome products obtained from the workshop, it can be stated that a multi-future way of thinking and collective production contributes to imaginative free play in the architectural design process and is a proposal to architecture as a possible preparation for the future.

Antonio Sant’Elia’s project for a future city opens a new season for architecture where utopia and the image of a city are inseparable. Between the 19th and 20th century several architects studied their contemporary city and its possible improvement through changes of existing models, but still no one had suggested a brand new configuration for the city of the future. The design process of the Città Nuova is a metonymic process through which Sant’Elia transfers knowledge and learning from one field of interest to another: his cultural roots involve ideas and visions taken from various contexts such as the first science fiction literature or American illustrations. If architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space we can consider Antonio Sant’Elia a simultaneous interpreter of thoughts and images that he decided to translate into architecture using the tools of drawing. Nevertheless this architecture is unbuilt, it is pure image.

A survey of modern formal theories and tropes compiled by students during a seminar of the same name taught by Yale School of Architecture professor Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen at the Beinecke Rare Books Library in spring 2012.

Il Futurismo, sotto la spinta della rivoluzione industriale e del progresso tecnologico, propone con fantasia e forte impegno divulgativo una città consona alle esigenze dell’uomo del XX secolo. Le profezie di architetti e teorici futuristi, a cui non hanno fatto seguito realizzazioni concrete, meritano un posto nella storia dell’urbanistica contemporanea Under the influence of industrial revolution and technological progress, futurism proposed, with imagination and a strong divulgative endeavour, a city conforming to 20th century man’s needs. The unrealised prophecies of futurist architects and theorists deserve a place in the history of contemporary town planning.