. La centrale elettrica, 1914
. La Città nuova, 1914
was an extremely influential Italian architect.
He was born in Como, Lombardy. A builder by training, he opened a design office in Milan in 1912 and became involved with the
Futurist movement. Between 1912 and 1914, influenced by industrial cities of the United States and the Viennese architects
Otto Wagner and
Adolf Loos, he began a series of design drawings for a futurist Città Nuova ("New City") that was conceived as symbolic of a new age.
The manifesto Futurist Architecture was published in August 1914, supposedly by Sant'Elia, though this is subject to debate. In it the author stated that
"the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials".
As described in this manifesto, his designs featured bold groupings and large-scale disposition of planes and masses creating a heroic industrial expressionism. His vision was for a highly industrialised and mechanized city of the future, which he saw not as a mass of individual buildings but a vast, multi-level, interconnected and integrated urban conurbation designed around the "life" of the city. His extremely influential designs featured vast monolithic skyscraper buildings with terraces, bridges and aerial walkways that embodied the sheer excitement of modern architecture and technology.
