The Spatialization of Avant-Garde Consciousness: Antonio Sant’Elia’s Città Nuova and the Experience of Modernity in Italy
p. 39-46
Résumé
In 1914 the Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia completed a series of drawings titled La città nuova and wrote the “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture” in which it is stated that every generation should have its own city. Concentrating on Sant’Elia and his visual and textual ideas of the new city, this essay discusses the relationship between a sense of the new and the avant-garde generation in Italy. Sant’Elia’s new city is understood as a generational consciousness of the changes of modernity in Italy, particularly in the context of Milan. The city is suggested here as a mental holding space, projecting beyond the built environment into a future to come. La città nuova gave visual form to the forces of modernity experienced in Milan, such as feelings of speed and change coupled with technological advancements and was completed on the cusp of World War I, which itself was initially envisioned as an opportunity for the realization of the Futurists’ artistic-social ideals.
Texte intégral
We must invent and rebuild ex novo the modern city like an immense, tumultuous building yard, agile, mobile, dynamic in all its parts, and the modern house like a gigantic machine. Elevators must not huddle in stairwells like solitary worms, rather staircases – now rendered useless – must be abolished, and elevators must swarm up the facades like serpents of iron and glass. The house of cement, glass, iron, stripped of painting and sculpture, enriched solely with the inherent beauty of its lines and its relief, extraordinarily ugly in its mechanical simplicity, as tall and as wide as it need be rather than as prescribed by municipal law, must rise on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer stretch out like a doormat at ground level but will plunge into earth by means of several stories that will bring together the traffic of the metropolis and be connected by metalcatwalks and swift-moving conveyor belts for necessary displacements.
Sant’Elia, “Messaggio”, 1914.1
1This declaration by Antonio Sant’Elia, referred to as the “Messaggio,” was written on the occasion of his participation in the Nuove Tendenze exhibition in Milan in May 1914, shortly before he would become a member of the Futurist group.2 The Nuove Tendenze was an association of modernist painters, architects and sculptors in Milan who were less radical than the Futurists, but who also thematized and glorified the machine age.3 It was here in the 1914 exhibition that Sant’Elia exhibited six works signed by him as La Città Nuova, The New City. While referring to a city, the drawings [Fig. 6] are in fact parts of a city, individual, autonomous and monumental buildings. None of these buildings would be realized by the young architect, as Sant’Elia only carried out one building, a villa around Lake Como, in his short lifetime. Sant’Elia is thus an architect famed not for what he built, but for that which he envisioned, and even this remains incomplete. The architect’s imagined urban structures function as objects for thinking about the future of cities, or cities for a new generation. The phenomenon of the new itself implies an appearance of change. Giulio Carlo Argan speaks of the new in terms of Sant’Elia and his urban visions as a taking up of the new spiritual needs. The vision of a new city itself creates a new desire that can only be satisfied by the creation itself and so understood as ambient of a psychological drama.4
2In this paper we’ll understand Sant’Elia’s work as a space of change in the early twentieth century. The big city was both the scene of breaks with the past in the years leading into World War I, and it was also symbolic of those conditions of modernity. Moving into the twentieth century, cities were increasingly characterized by problems, such lack of space, density, congestion and increasing housing costs, issues then countered by new artistic investigations of the urban space.5 Describing the nature of the large city of modernity as place of change, Lewis Mumford wrote, “The living memory of the city, which once bound together generations and centuries, disappears: its inhabitants live in a self-annihilating moment-to-moment continuum.”6
3Lacking a clear form, the city is defined by expansion and velocity. While moving towards a formlessness in a non-containable movement, it is this very quality which is taken up by Sant’Elia and his fellow collaborators as the space of their generation, or of containing a sense of a collective self through the new city. Together with Sant’Elia, this is especially true of the Futurist painter and sculptor – and friend of Sant’Elia – Umberto Boccioni. Boccioni’s Cavallo + Cavaliere + Caseggiato of 1914 reflects his visual vocabulary of horses and architectural objects of the city, in this case a block of flats, together with angular, broken forms expressing the phenomenon of simultaneity and the elasticity of objects as they are brought into context with the forces of the city. In contrast to earlier works, however, the low angle gives a greater sense of monumentality and austerity to the architecture, which is modernistic in nature with the unadorned walls. The expressive mass and vertical emphasis recalls the visions of Sant’Elia, but whereas the architect’s urban spaces remain empty, in Boccioni’s image the scene is filled with the large horse in movement in the foreground and appearances of a cavalryman, as referred to in the title, whose features morph together with those of the horse. It is with the figure of the cavalryman that the context of war becomes present, as becomes more explicit in Carica di lancieri from 1914-15. Here the repetition of horses together with the lances, which are shown in a violent confrontation with soldiers with bayonets, represent the aggression of war clearly seen in the context of World War I and the conflict between the Germans and French through the newspaper clippings that Boccioni has used for the background.
Fig. 6: Antonio Sant’Elia, La Città Nuova. Casa a gradinata con ascensori esterni [Terraced Living Complex on Different Levels], 1914, watercolor on paper, 45,3 x 35,3 cm. Collection Margherita Gaetani.

4The tumultuous declaration of Sant’Elia’s “Messaggio” text, similar to the texts of the Futurists, implies a kind of destruction through the very call for an ex novo construction of the city, an action drawing upon and glorifying the kind of forces central to the nature of war: an aggressive redistribution of power through the power of machines and men, as well as an anticipation of change and sense of being engulfed within this very change. The impending moment of projecting an alternative mode of living implies a new type of self. Indeed the architect appears himself as a new image of man in his 1911 self-portrait composed in the angular and dynamic style of the Futurist idiom. I suggest here that it was the sensation and anticipation of change that appears in the imagery of a future city as an unrealized space for the formation of a consciousness of belonging to a break in time. While such a city doesn’t itself necessitate war, it draws upon the same desires and creates a perspective for re-ordering reality and implies an act of containment. Both the city and war were imagined ruptures with the past that represented an anti-traditional direction. Looking to the relationship between the real and the imaginary, the psychoanalytical object relations theorist Christopher Bollas writes, “Over time a self organizes thousands of interests (and their history) into psychic areas that make possible differing new perspectives on the self’s vision of reality.”7 Bollas is speaking here of psychic genera, or constellations of mental material taken from object world experiences and giving a perspective upon the past and future through their arrangement.8 The perspective in question in the case of the new city in 1914 is that of the avant-garde as expressed by Jürgen Habermas as an understanding of “invading unknown territory” and the exposure to “the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future” and a finding of a landscape still un-ventured.9 And as Donald Kuspit notes, the belief in change of the avant-garde was a conviction of the power to alter consciousness.10 The desired city is the landscape for altering consciousness that by the nature of its promise of the new must remain unrealized. The unexplored avant-garde landscape is then a cityscape incomplete in itself, but working to form a perspective on the transformations experienced in contemporary society.
5Sant’Elia’s and the Futurists’ sensitivity to changing technologies and the desire for new states of mind created through their work is well known.11 The architect pulled from various sources, including from representations of skyscrapers in New York and Otto Wagner’s designs for Vienna as well as from his work as a whole.12 These encounters were virtual, often occurring through the images as presented in architecture journals to which Sant’Elia had access to as a student at the Accademia di Brera in Milan13. Modernity’s defining transformations were palpable in Milan, which almost doubled in population from 314,187 inhabitants in 1881 to 600,612 in 1911.14 With this increase in population came an increase in the built fabric of the city which also doubled within this time frame, so that entire new quarters arose from a seeming nothingness.15 The balance between the old center and peripheral aggregations, between habitation and the location of enterprises was disrupted as the center itself was opened up with the destruction of existing structures for the creation of new streets, urban squares and modern buildings and with the introduction and development of the tram system.16 Processes of tertiarization and the clearing out of the center were continued and organized through the adoption of a master plan developed by Angelo Pavia and Giovanni Masera in 1910 and approved in 1912.17 After moving from his hometown of Como to Milan in 1906, Sant’Elia would have had thorough knowledge of the new plan. He had completed a training in Como as a master builder (capomastro) and then received a job in Milan as draughtsman in the Department of Public Works where the master plan was carried out, which included attention to new infrastructure and public housing projects.18 The urban mutation underway in the Lombardian capital was supported by the growth of industry, such as the automobile, flight and printing industries. They changed the nature of the city through their new modes of production in transportation and the dissemination of information, but their extensive and technologically advanced facilities were also contributing to the appearance of the new cityscape as well.19
6The new values defining urban space had already been re-forming the city in the nineteenth century with the master plan of Cesare Beruto of 1889 that, while expanding the city and opening it up, also consolidated a radio-centric pattern around the historic core of Milan.20 Leading up to this plan and included in the opening up of the center was the re-organization of the piazza del Duomo, re-structured in a large part by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, designed by Giuseppe Mengoni and opened in 1867 [Fig. 7]. Adjacent to the Cathedral, the large shopping arcade counters the traditional power of the church with that of an emerging force, that of commerce. Daring for its time and the largest covered public space of the period, the Galleria rises to 30 meters with a width of 14 meters.21 Not only a celebration of commerce, the edifice is also a demonstration of the use of iron and glass with an octagonal glass dome in the center. Rather than celebrate the beauty of the structural elements, however, they are mostly covered over with stone cladding of arches, pilasters, framed windows and notable entablature. An over-dimensional triumphal arch leads from the Piazza del Duomo into the inner space and is centered by loggias framing the perimeter of the piazza, emphasizing itself and lending it a sense of uniformity. The evocation of the monumentality of the new commercial space and the drama associated with it is visualized in Boccioni’s Rissa (Brawl) in Galleria from 1911. Not yet in the more angular manner of fragmented and simultaneous forms of his later Futurist style, the pointillist technique still conveys a sense of the energy of crowds in the massive space of the Galleria, an energy turned violent and so reflecting the awe of the destructive powers contained within the modern world.
Fig. 7: Looking from the Milan Duomo onto the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, designed by Giuseppe Mengoni and opened in 1867. Photo by the author.

7Reyner Banham positions the thought of the Futurists in relation to the particularly “radical change-over to a technological society” felt in Northern Italy brought about by the Risorgimento, or the process of Italian unity culminating in 1861, when cities like Milan and Turin experienced a newfound attention.22 Turning back to the idea of perspective as an ordering of reality into new constellations, Futurist imagery can be understood as a re-imagining of the urban environments of the North, especially Milan and an aggrandizement of the evocative power of the disjunction between new and old. Sant’Elia’s series of power plants, for example, draw upon and fictionalize mechanisms of symbolic importance for Milan. The first power plants in Italy were constructed around the city and were significant in the important economic role Milan would take on for Italy in the twentieth century.23 In addition to those drawings strictly identified by the architect as the new city, Sant’Elia also included works of power stations in his 1914 contribution to the Nuove Tendenze exhibition. Again, the low view of the depicted structures emphasizes their verticality and monumentality, which Esther da Costa Meyer refers to as “an awe-struck admiration for the topic rather than a profound understanding of how the vast complexes work”.24 Rather than being set in a landscape, the complexes comprise the entire environment. Heavy outlines support a sense of dramatic mood as do the dark tones and suggestive forms. With their towers and simplified constructive features given a plastic quality through the play of shadows, the stations take on a spiritual quality. Like a sublime landscape, the power plants engulf an implied but absent subject. Humans are completely absent from Sant’Elia’s technological cityscapes. In Station for airplanes and trains with funiculars and elevators on three street levels, from La Città Nuova [Fig. 8], a bird’s eye view conveys the perspective of an incoming plane, yet no actual vehicles of transportation are present. Symmetrically ordered towers frame the funicular inclines in the center, creating a type of modern temple from the functional transportation mechanics. Verticality and the expressivity of the structural framework dominate throughout La Città Nuova images, recalling the skyscraper, which had become an object of fantasy for European architects at this time. Associated with America, the skyscraper became a symbol for the absence of tradition.25 Again, it was also an object that Sant’Elia would only have known through its representation in media. He, however, takes the idea of the skyscraper and transforms it into an image of urban order. The clean and dynamic visions are set into organized spaces where the city is not overwhelmed by movement and traffic, but where the city is a regulatory phenomenon.
Fig. 8: Antonio Sant’elia, La Città Nuova. Stazione d’aeroplani e treni con funicolari e ascensori su tre piani stradali [Station for airplanes and trains with funiculars and elevators on three street levels], 1914, ink on paper, 50 x 39 cm. Como, Pinacoteca Civica di Palazzo Volpi.

8Like in the work of fellow Nuove Tendenze architect Mario Chiattone, with whom Sant’Elia shared a studio, Sant’Elia’s towering edifices are decontextualized from the city at large. The architect gives us no urban plans or larger overview of how his city will appear. This adds to the futuristic vision of it allowing the imagination to continue the idea. While Futurist painters and poets generally expressed the instability of new forces in the city, Sant’Elia fuses them into fragments of an unknown urban realm transmitting a feeling of great power and energy in the overpowering technological constructions that would engulf the absent imagined subject. It is particularly this faculty of absorption into an urban intensity, which parallels the aesthetic tendencies of the Futurists, particularly those of Umberto Boccioni. Having enrolled at the Academy of Brera in 1909 to further study architecture, Sant’Elia came into contact with Boccioni and others who would soon join the Futurist movement and who frequented circles associated with the Academy.26 After the Nuove Tendenze exhibition, Sant’Elia was asked in 1914 to become an official member of the Futurist group. His exhibition text was then transformed – most likely by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder and leader of the Futurists – into the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture. It received a more nationalist angle dismissing the architecture of other nations and closing with the statement:
The fundamental characteristics of futurist architecture will be obsolescence and transience. [Our] HOUSESWILL NOT LASTAS LONGASWE SHALL. EACH GENERATION WILL HAVE TO BUILD ITS OWN CITY.27
9Sant’Elia is reported to have been unhappy with this last phrase, and indeed even the authorship of the “Messaggio” text has been called into question.28 Yet through the turns of phrase in the manifesto, he becomes a member of a group whose very name takes up that expectation of the as yet unknown future. Sant’Elia’s belonging to the Futurists would soon be tangible in his participation in World War I. As Italy entered the war in 1915, the Futurists, including Sant’Elia, enlisted together, organizing events for the other soldiers before going out onto the front and after their return writing a manifesto about their heroic experiences titled “L’orgoglio italiano” (the pride of Italy).29 Soon after, the architect was fatally wounded on October 10, 1916, about two months after Boccioni had already been killed.
10The idea of the possibility of war had awakened heroic dreams of the future which had been unfulfilled through the wars of unification.30 In 1914 those aspirations could remain a potentiality. It has been proposed here in quintessence that the new remains unattainable in any concrete way, but is present as a generative principle. The new city is an evocation relative to experiences of transformations occurring in modernity, providing a virtual space for a new sense of consciousness. Working and living in Milan, Sant’Elia responded to the city not by rendering a likeness of it, but creating an imaginary and potential city and therefore expressing the character of the new as decoupled from, yet dependent upon, its material realization. The year 1914 represented a moment when the prospect of war aligned with a vision of the new that could be projected into the future.
Notes de bas de page
1 Sant’elia, Antonio. “Messaggio” (1914). Republished in Da Costa Meyer, Esther. The Work of Antonio Sant’Elia, Retreat into the Future. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 211.
2 Da Costa Meyer, Esther, p. 89-96.
3 Ibid.
4 Argan, Giulio Carlo. “Il pensiero critic di Sant’Elia.” Dopo Sant’Elia. Argan, Giulio Carlo, et al. (eds.). Milan: Editoriale Domus, 1935, p. 43-55: 51.
5 Benevolo, Leonardo. The European City. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993, p. 196.
6 Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. San Diego: Harcout, 1961, republished 1989, p. 545.
7 Bollas, Christopher. The Evocative Object World. London and New York: Routledge, 2009, p. 28.
8 Ibid., p. 28-29.
9 Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity – An Incomplete Project” (1980). Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood (eds.). Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992, p. 1000-1008: 1001.
10 Kuspit, Donald. Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 2.
11 Da Costa Meyer, Esther, p. 147.
12 Longatti, Alberto. “Der ‘Visionär einer Vision aus Eisen’.” Antonio Sant’Elia: Gezeichnete Architektur. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1992, p. 37-55: 40.
13 Ibid.
14 Boatti, Antonello. Urbanistica a Milano: Sviluppo urbano, pianificazione e ambiente tra passato e futuro. Novara: De Agostini Scuola, 2007, p. 35.
15 Ibid., p. 36-37.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., p. 38.
18 Da Costa Meyer, Esther, p 14-16.
19 Ibid., p. 14.
20 Oliva, Federico. L’urbanistica di Milano: Quel che resta dei piani urbanistici nella crescita e nella trasformazione della città. Milan: Hoepli, 2007, p. 36.
21 Ibid., p. 371.
22 Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London: The Architectural Press, 1960, p. 101.
23 Da Costa Meyer, Esther, p. 14.
24 Ibid., p. 68.
25 Ibid., p. 134.
26 Ibid., p. 94.
27 Ibid., p. 154.
28 Ibid., p. 154-157.
29 Ibid., p. 182-185.
30 Ibid., p. 39-40.
Auteur
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Scott Budzynski
Completed his Ph.D. in art history at Stony Brook University and lives in Berlin and Savannah, GA. He researches themes of memory and modernity in urban spaces and is currently focusing on post-World War IIMilan. He was previously a lecturer at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany and is now professor of art history at Savannah College of Art and Design.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Arts drogués
Expériences psychotropiques et création artistique
Fabrice Flahutez et Miguel Egaña (dir.)
2013
