Antonio Sant'Elia was an Italian architect and key member of the Futurist movement in early 20th century architecture. Between 1912-1914, he created a series of visionary drawings called "Città Nuova" depicting a modern city of the future as a "gigantic machine" with structures connected by highways, railways, and multi-level streets. Sant'Elia advocated for an architecture without ornamentation that embraced new materials and circulation. Though he built no structures, his dynamic sketches influenced later architects and films like Blade Runner through their depiction of vertical, mechanized cities.

1. Dr. Amr El-Gohary
Group Names:
NardeenAlbear Milad
MonicaWilliam Makram
MiraWahibThabet
Sara Fayez Keriakous Brais

2. • Antonio Sant'Elia ( 30 April 1888 – 10 October 1916) was an
Italian architect. Notable for his visionary drawings of the city of
the future.
• In 1912 he began practicing architecture in Milan, where he
became involved with the Futurist movement. Between 1912
and 1914 he made many highly imaginative drawings and plans
for cities of the future. A group of these drawings called Città
Nuova (“New City”) was displayed in May 1914 at an exhibition
of the NuoveTendenze group, of which he was a member.
• Sant’Elia volunteered for army duty shortly after the outbreak of
WorldWar I, and he died in the battle of Monfalcone.
Background:

3. • He was a key member of the Futurist movement in architecture.
He left behind almost no completed works of architecture and is
primarily remembered for his bold sketches and influence on
modern architecture.
• Between 1912 and 1914, influenced by industrial cities of the
United States and the architects OttoWagner, Adolf Loos, and
the Genoese architect Renzo Picasso, he began a series of design
drawings for a futurist Città Nuova ("NewCity") that was
conceived as a symbol of a new age.
Background:

4. Città Nuova “New City”
• Sant’Elia proposed a vision of a Modern city that took the form of a “gigantic machine.” Central to his
Citta Nuova concept is the electrifying dynamism championed by his futurist contemporaries. Sant’Elia
embraced the ideal of motion and activity.
Some components of Sant'Elia's futuristic city:
• The obsession with circulation:
A striking aspect of Sant’Elia’s design is his de-emphasis on the autonomy of buildings.That is, his design
choices for the Citta Nuova implicitly reflect on the futurist philosophy of beauty in motion, and
correspondingly seek to promote the unfettered circulation of objects – people, automobiles, trains, etc.
• In “La Citta Nuova, detail” (above) Sant’Elia demonstrates this concept by converging the various
channels of transportation – glass and metal walkways, highways and railways – at various heights
near the base of the structure.
• Traffic channels penetrate everywhere, and are the only structures that have been determined.

5. “Città Nuova” , Sant'Elia’s Sketch “Città Nuova” , Rendered
Città Nuova “New City”

6. “Città Nuova” , Sant'Elia’s Sketch “Città Nuova” , Rendered
Città Nuova “New City”

7. • He declared that architecture must begin again from
the beginning.
• He called for an architecture of new materials, without
ornament or decoration, and an architecture of oblique
and elliptical lines.
• He abandons the traditional architectural presentation
forms plan and elevation and the emphasis on
construction details and relies entirely on perspective
drawings because they allowed him to convey the
atmosphere of urban dynamism.
His Ideas:
We Can list his idea in the following points :

8. • The problem of Futurist architecture must be resolved, not by
continuing to steal from Chinese, Persian or Japanese photographs
or fooling around with the rules ofVitruvius, but through flashes of
genius and through scientific and technical experience.
• Everything must be revolutionized
• Roofs and underground spaces must be used
• the importance of the façade must be diminished
• issues of taste must be transplanted from the field of fussy
moldings, finicky capitals and flimsy doorways to the broader
concerns of bold groupings and masses, and large-scale
disposition of planes
• Putting an end of monumental, funereal and commemorative
architecture.
• overturning monuments, pavements, arcades and flights of steps.
• Raising the level of the city.
His Ideas:

9. Philosophy:
• Architecture has not existed since the year 700. A foolish motley of the most heterogeneous
elements of style, used only to mask the skeleton of the modern house, goes under the name of
modern architecture.The new beauty of cement and iron is profaned by the superimposition of
carnivalesque decorative encrustations that are justified neither by structural necessity nor by
our tastes, encrustations that take their origins from Egyptian, Byzantine, or Indian antiquities,
or from that stupefying efflorescence of idiocy and impotence that has taken the name of neo-
classicism.
• Thus, in their hands, this expressive and synthetic art has become a stylistic exercise, a
rummaging through a hotchpotch of old formulas meant to disguise the usual passéist sleight-
of-hand in brick and stone as a modern building. As if we, accumulators and generators of
movement, with all our mechanical extensions of ourselves, with all the noise and speed of our
lives, could ever live in the same houses and streets constructed to meet the needs of men who
lived four, five, or six centuries ago.

10. • the problem of Futurist architecture is not a problem of rearranging its lines. It is not a question
of finding new moldings, new architraves for windows and doors; nor of replacing columns
pilasters, and corbels with caryatids, hornets, and frogs; not a question of leaving a façade bare
brick or facing it with plaster or stone; it has nothing to do with defining formalistic differences
between new buildings and old ones; but with raising the Futurist house on a healthy plan,
gleaning every benefit of science and technology, nobly settling every demand of our habits and
minds, rejecting all that is grotesque, heavy, and antithetical to our being (tradition, style,
aesthetics, proportion), establishing new forms, new lines, new harmonies for profiles and
volumes.
Philosophy:

11. School of Architecture:
• He was a key member of the Futurist movement in architecture.
• Antonio Sant’Elia was the primary driving force behind Futurist architecture.
• Antonio Sant'Elia wrote the official Manifesto of Futurist Architecture in 1914.The published
manifesto was primarily a consolidation and editing of ideas previously developed in Messaggio,
a document that was also written by Sant'Elia.
• The Futurist movement existed as a distinct entity from 1909 – 1944
• characterized by strong chromaticism, long dynamic lines, suggesting speed, motion, urgency
and lyricism.
• The Futurists were interested in anything new and anything having to do with technology. In
addition to their obsession with new things they were equally interested in a complete disposal
of the past.This combination of interests drew the Futurists heavily to the hustle and bustle of
city life. As such it would make sense that some of the Futurists had ideas for improving upon
their choice living area.

12. • With this decoupling from the past the Futurists fully embraced any new technologies they could
get their hands on. Not only did they want new materials to be used in their new designs they
did not want the new materials to go anywhere near design themes from the pastThe manifesto
states that usage of new materials in the construction of buildings with historical designs
desecrates the materials.
• Architecture is constructed of degradable materials ensuring that nothing would endure past a
single generation.This degrading architecture effectively makes each generation responsible for
the construction of their towns and cities.
School of Architecture:

13. Manifesto of Architecture
• The drawings Antonio Sant’Elia included in his August 1914 Futurist Manifesto of Architecture
are, perhaps, the most famous and influential of the early 20th century, predating many of the
avant-garde designs of architects in Germany, France, Holland, and Russia, made a few years
later.
• They are certainly the first by a European architect to project a vertical city, one composed not
only of towers, but also of stacked layers of streets, plazas, and the mechanical movement of
cars, trams, and trains.
• By publishing the drawings with the Manifesto, Sant’Elia himself was inviting comparisons
between his words and architectural designs.When we make them, we find both thrilling
conjunctions and puzzling contradictions.

14. • For example:
• “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.”
Manifesto of Architecture

15. Manifesto of Architecture

16. Manifesto of Architecture

17. His influence :
• Most of his works were never built, but he influenced many late architects; as John Portman , ((a
neofuturistic architect )),as in “James R.Thompson Center” and Helmut Jahn, a German-
American architect, as in “The Marriott Marquis hotel in Georgia”
James R.Thompson Center, by John PortmanThe Marriott Marquis hotel, by Helmut Jahn

18. • Sant’Elia’s drawings also influenced the cinematic worlds of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; both directors dreamed of cities in the sky too.
His influence :
Blade Runner film Cityscape

19. His Sketches
He translated his ideas into a series of drawings known as “architecture dynamisms”, in which pyramids,
buttresses, towers, churches, monumental factories and stepped palaces, complete with external elevators
and surrounded by multilevel streets, represent different facets of his ideal metropolis of the future.

20. His Sketches
Sant’Elia’s drawings survive and many can be viewed at Pinacoteca, Como’s art gallery.

21. His Sketches

22. His Sketches