Page 23 - Studio International - November 1973

THE IDEA OF ARCHITECTURE AND

URBAN SPACE IN FUTURISM

work, by pleasure, or by uprising; we will sing
of the multi-coloured and polyphonic tides of
revolutions in modern capitals; we will sing of
the vibrant fervour by night of arsenals and
shipyards ablaze with violent electric moons; of
the greedy stations that devour smoking
serpents; of the factories hung from the clouds
by the twisting strings of their smoke; of the
bridges like giant gymnasts astride the rivers,
glittering in the sun with the flash of knives. . .'1
In his futurist speech to the Venetians,
8 July 1910, Marinetti turns to Venice to
counterpropose for it a destiny of a frenetic
metropolitan port:
`And we now wish electric lamps with a
thousand points of light brutally to cut and tear
away your mysterious shadows, bewitching and
seductive. Your Grand Canal, widened and
dredged, fatefully will become a great
commercial port. Trains and tramways
hurtling along the streets built over the canals
finally filled in, will bring you mountains of
merchandise, surrounded by a wise and rich
crowd of busy industrialists and traders ! . . .
Don't shout at the alleged ugliness of the
locomotive, of the tram, of the automobile, and
of the bicycle where we see the first outlines of
the great futurist aesthetic.'2
But already some months earlier, the futurist
painters in their manifesto, dated r r February
1910, associated their 'ideas with those of the
futurist poets', and declared :
`Only that art is alive which finds its proper
elements in the environment surrounding it. As
our ancestors drew the material of art from the
religious atmosphere which weighed upon their
souls, so must we, too, seek inspiration in the
tangible miracles of contemporary life, in the
iron web of speed wrapped round the earth, in
transatlantic liners, in Dreadnoughts, in the
marvellous flights that furrow the skies, in the
The reconstruction of the futurist theories, space can be seen from at least two points of shadowy daring of underwater navigators, in the
those projects that have come down to us view. There is the theorizing and planning frenzied struggle to conquer the unknown'.3
(originally very few and today verging on the evident in specific examples; there are the There are then two motifs : speed as the result
non- existent) and the architectural schemes intuitions one can sense underlying their of technological progress, and the metropolis as
actually carried out, of Sant'Elia, Chiattone, plastic and, more rarely, literary works; also the specific field of life and thus of contemporary
Balla, Marchi, Prampolini, Depero, Pannaggi, there are the theories underlying their other, inspiration.
Fillia, Sartoris, and the 'second-wave' Turin non-architectural manifestoes. Their insistence In the 'technical' manifesto, Futurist
futurists who wanted to recreate an entire upon urban space as the field of action of modern Painting, of 11 April 1910 (signed by Boccioni,
articulate tradition, offers only one face — life in general, and of Futurism in particular, Carra, Russolo, Balla and Severini), the
although doubtless a specific and therefore both formative and 'reconstructive', resulted in dynamics of urban space form the typical field
essential one — of the futurist understanding of its becoming the most characteristic site of a in which to find manifestations of a new
architecture. Futurism is concerned not only movement of the imagination. More than sensibility :
with architecture but also with its field of Cubism, Futurism was deliberately urban. It `Everything moves, everything runs,
operation, urban space, held to be the offered an effective heritage of metropolitan everything develops rapidly. A figure is never
inescapable emblematic site of modern life. `imagery'. still before us but appears and disappears
Here the celebration of its `modernolatry' took Modern collective, urban space and the urban incessantly. Due to the persistence of the image
place, for which it would brook no substitute, crowd are singled out in Marinetti's founding on the retina, things in motion are multiplied,
either in painting and literature or, later, in manifesto of r r February 1909 as a typical deformed, successively, like vibrations
architecture. theme for futurist art: travelling through space.'
Futurist ideas on architecture and urban `We will sing of the crowds agitated by And the most famous and wholly urban
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