Antonio Sant’Elia
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.
These
architectonic prostitutions are welcomed in Italy, and rapacious alien
ineptitude is passed off as talented invention and as extremely up-to-date
architecture. 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, seventeenth-century foliation, Gothic pointed arches, Egyptian
pilasters, rococo scrolls, fifteenth-century cherubs, swollen caryatids, take
the place of style in all seriousness, and presumptuously put on monumental
airs. The kaleidoscopic appearance and reappearance of forms, the multiplying
of machinery, the daily increasing needs imposed by the speed of communications,
by the concentration of population, by hygiene, and by a hundred other
phenomena of modern life, never cause these self-styled renovators of
architecture a moment's perplexity or hesitation. They persevere obstinately
with the rules of Vitruvius, Vignola and Sansovino plus gleanings from any
published scrap of information on German architecture that happens to be at
hand. Using these, they continue to stamp the image of imbecility on our
cities, our cities which should be the immediate and faithful projection of
ourselves.
And so
this expressive and synthetic art has become in their hands a vacuous stylistic
exercise, a jumble of ill-mixed formulae to disguise a run-of-the-mill
traditionalist box of bricks and stone as a modern building. As if we who are
accumulators and generators of movement, with all our added mechanical limbs,
with all the noise and speed of our life, could live in streets built for the
needs of men four, five or six centuries ago.
This is
the supreme imbecility of modern architecture, perpetuated by the venal
complicity of the academies, the internment camps of the intelligentsia, where
the young are forced into the onanistic recopying of classical models instead
of throwing their minds open in the search for new frontiers and in the solution
of the new and pressing problem: the
Futurist house and city. The
house and the city that are ours both spiritually and materially, in which our
tumult can rage without seeming a grotesque anachronism.
The
problem posed in Futurist architecture is not one of linear
rearrangement. It is not a question of finding new moldings and frames for
windows and doors, of replacing columns, pilasters and corbels with caryatids,
flies and frogs. Neither has it anything to do with leaving a façade in bare
brick, or plastering it, or facing it with stone or in determining formal
differences between the new building and the old one. It is a question of
tending the healthy growth of the Futurist house, of constructing it with all
the resources of technology and science, satisfying magisterially all the
demands of our habits and our spirit, trampling down all that is grotesque and
antithetical (tradition, style, aesthetics, proportion), determining new forms,
new lines, a new harmony of profiles and volumes, an architecture whose reason
for existence can be found solely in the unique conditions of modern life, and
in its correspondence with the aesthetic values of our sensibilities. This
architecture cannot be subjected to any law of historical continuity. It must
be new, just as our state of mind is new.
The art
of construction has been able to evolve with time, and to pass from one style
to another, while maintaining unaltered the general characteristics of
architecture, because in the course of history changes of fashion are frequent
and are determined by the alternations of religious conviction and political
disposition. But profound changes in the state of the environment are extremely
rare, changes that unhinge and renew, such as the discovery of natural laws,
the perfecting of mechanical means, the rational and scientific use of
material. In modern life the process of stylistic development in architecture
has been brought to a halt. Architecture
now makes a break with tradition. It must perforce make a fresh start.
Calculations
based on the resistance of materials, on the use of reinforced concrete and
steel, exclude "architecture" in the classical and traditional sense.
Modern constructional materials and scientific concepts are absolutely
incompatible with the disciplines of historical styles, and are the principal
cause of the grotesque appearance of "fashionable" buildings in which
attempts are made to employ the lightness, the superb grace of the steel beam,
the delicacy of reinforced concrete, in order to obtain the heavy curve of the
arch and the bulkiness of marble.
The
utter antithesis between the modern world and the old is determined by all
those things that formerly did not exist. Our lives have been enriched by
elements the possibility of whose existence the ancients did not even suspect.
Men have identified material contingencies, and revealed spiritual attitudes,
whose repercussions are felt in a thousand ways. Principal among these is the
formation of a new ideal of beauty that is still obscure and embryonic, but
whose fascination is already felt even by the masses. We have lost our
predilection for the monumental, the heavy, the static, and we have enriched
our sensibility with a taste
for the light, the practical, the ephemeral and the swift. We no longer feel ourselves to be
the men of the cathedrals, the palaces and the podiums. We are the men of the
great hotels, the railway stations, the immense streets, colossal ports,
covered markets, luminous arcades, straight roads and beneficial demolitions.
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.
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