Antonio Sant’Elia, 1914
A Futurist City Prefiguring the Architecture of Blade Runner
The Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia got little chance to construct anything at all. Starting out as a builder, he opened his architectural office in Milan in 1912, but went off to fight in the First World War when his country joined the war in 1915. He was killed in battle in 1916. Sant’Elia left behind a large collection of drawings, including many for an imaginary metropolis, the Città Nuova (New City), a city of tall buildings with dramatic setbacks, covered streets and rapid highways. It looks as if it is mostly made of steel and glass, and it is strikingly modern for 1914: a new city indeed. Although the city was never built, Sant’Elia’s beautifully executed drawings have influenced generations of architects and inspired filmmakers who wanted to evoke futuristic urban landscapes, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) onwards.
What was behind Sant’Elia’s city design? First of all, Sant’Elia was a committed member of the Futurists, an artistic group founded in Italy that wanted to transform art and make it fit for the modern age. The Italian Futurists gathered around the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of the Futurist Manifesto, which expresses the group’s love of technology, speed, youth and, most disturbingly, violence. They would have nothing to do with the past and wanted to sweep it away – violently if necessary – and replace it with a world in which machines were key. They were also extreme nationalists.
The Futurists even produced a separate architectural manifesto, which was probably written by Sant’Elia. Taking its cue from Marinetti’s Manifesto, it rejects the great buildings of former civilizations: ‘We feel that we are no longer the men of the cathedrals and ancient moot halls, but men of the Grand Hotels, railroad stations, giant roads, colossal harbours, covered markets, glittering arcades, reconstruction areas and salutary slum clearances.’ Instead of finding value in religion and its architecture, the guiding light comes from the world of machinery and industry: ‘We must invent and rebuild our Futurist city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, active, mobile and everywhere dynamic, and the Futurist house like a gigantic machine.’
An architect who wanted to build in new ways fitted easily into this aesthetic. Futurist architecture, said Sant’Elia, should be all about exposed, ‘raw or bare’ materials and bright, ‘violently coloured’ surfaces. In Futurist cities, buildings would be made of iron girders and sheets of glass produced in factories using machines (there was no place for the arts and crafts here), and aeroplanes, trains and cars would have priority over pedestrians. The Futurist city was an exciting but heartless place.
One can see some of this in Sant’Elia’s drawings of the Città Nuova. The buildings are on a huge scale, mostly multi-storey and set back so that they make wedge shapes, letting light into the streets below them. All these structures are drawn with rigorous, hard-edged precision. People would enter the buildings using mechanical means – next to each skyscraper was an elevator tower, connected to it by a series of bridges. Sant’Elia was fascinated by the lines of bridges, which are among the most striking features of his designs, providing a foil to the upward-thrusting skyscrapers. Critics have noticed that he includes more bridges than are strictly necessary, regardless of the huge cost that actually building them would have entailed.
Pairs of skyscrapers are sometimes linked by arches, to create covered highways below, but these streets are not protective arcades such as those of Victorian cities, but streets along which cars could pass and tracks along which trams could travel at speed. In fact, Sant’Elia was an early enthusiast for separating forms of traffic in this way, with different levels and routes for cars, trams and pedestrians. Some Victorian designers had proposed this sort of separation, but by combining it with an outwardly modern style of architecture Sant’Elia was a true forerunner of the planners and architects of the 1950s and 1960s.
The architecture is very industrial. Sant’Elia’s love of iron as a building material must have been influenced by what he saw around him in Milan, where he worked, and by his own unbuilt project for a new railway station in the city. Reinforced concrete was also being used widely at the time, but, like iron, it was usually hidden from view under a covering of carved decoration. In factories, however, metal beams and concrete structures were left exposed, and this ‘honest’ architecture, in which structure was not hidden behind ornament, was one source of inspiration for Sant’Elia. The elevator shafts probably come from industrial architecture, too: elevators were manufactured in Milan and widely used there in tall factories. As in American skyscraper architecture, glass was used more and more lavishly. The Città Nuova’s station for aeroplanes and trains, presented in an outstanding drawing, features a dramatic sloping glass facade on a huge scale. It would have been a major building and a focal point for the city.
Another break from the past was in planning. The communal assembly places of traditional cities, such as squares, have disappeared from the Città Nuova. Instead, the communal spaces are the railway stations and airports – transport hubs dominated by machines. It takes time, looking at the drawings, to recognize how mere humans fit into this urban pattern.
So far, so Futurist. Yet there are things about Sant’Elia’s city that have their roots in the old. The setbacks, although they are uniform, setting up a pattern of slopes and wedges across the city skyline, are based on those of skyscrapers that had already been proposed or built in New York City and also on recent designs for set-back buildings by French architects such as Henri Sauvage. The palette used by Sant’Elia was very restricted: there were none of the violent colours here that the Futurists demanded in their new, assertive architecture. It is as if Sant’Elia is already starting to modify his vision and move away from the violent and disturbing predictions of the Futurists.
After Sant’Elia died in 1916, aged just twenty-eight, the Città Nuova drawings were not forgotten. Most of them had been shown in 1914 at the exhibition of another forward-looking artistic group of which Sant’Elia was a member – the Nuove Tendenze. Architects noticed them, and the bold conception and modern look of the drawings held their attention: the city designs lived on to influence skyscraper builders and city planners. Architects still find something to admire in the dramatic forms of the buildings. They influenced another art form, too – films. The Città Nuova is an inspiring presence behind the sets of Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis and, through that film’s influence, in Ridley Scott’s 1992 Blade Runner, affecting different audiences in new ways.
