Antonio Sant'Elia
MANIFESTO OF FUTURIST ARCHITECTURE
1914

No architecture has existed since 1700. A moronic cocktail of the most various stylistic elements that used to cover up the skeletons of modern houses is called modern architecture . The new beauty of cement and iron is profaned by the superimposition of motley decorative incrustations that neither constructive necessity nor our (modern) taste can justify, and whose origins are Egyptian, Indian or Byzantine antiquity, or that idiotic flowering of stupidity and importance that took the name of NEOCLASSICISM.

Italy welcomes these architectonic prostitutions, where greedy alien ineptitude masquerades as talented invention and extremely up-to-date architecture. Young Italian architects (those who borrow originality from a secret and compulsive consumption of art magazines) flaunt their talents in the new quarters, where a hilarious salad of tiny ogival columns, seventeenth-century foliation, Gothic pointed arches, Egyptian pilaster, rococo scrolls, fifteenth-century putti, and swollen caryatids take the place of style in all seriousness, and presumptuously display monumental airs. The kaleidoscopic appearance and reappearance of forms, the multiplication of machinery, the increasing daily needs imposed by the speed of communications, by the concentration of the populace, 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 obstinately cling to 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 imprint 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 the 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 open their minds in the search for new frontiers and in the solution of the new and pressing problem: THE FUTURIST HOUSE AND CITY. The house and 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 mouldings and frames for windows and doors, of replacing columns, pilasters and corbels with caryatids, flies and frogs. Neither has it 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 being can be found solely within 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 environmental changes 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 construction materials and scientific concepts are absolutely incompatible with the disciplines of historical styles, and are the principle 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 were formerly non-existent. Our lives have been enriched by elements the possibility of whose existence the ancient 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 façade 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 be like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many floors down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan traffic, and will be linked up by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements for necessary interconnections.

THE DECORATIVE MUST BE ABOLISHED. The problem of Futurist architecture must be resolved, not by continuing to pilfer from Chinese, Persian or Japanese photographs or fooling around with the rules of Vitruvius, but through flashes of genius and through scientific and technical expertise. Everything must be revolutionized. Roofs and underground spaces must be utilized; the façade must be diminished in its importance; issues of taste must be transferred from the field of fussy mouldings, finicky capitals and flimsy doorways to the broader concerns of BOLD GROUPINGS AND MASSES, and LARGE-SCALE DISPOSITION OF PLANES. Let us bring monumental, funereal and commemorative architecture to an end. Let us overturn monuments, pavements, arcades and flights of steps; let us sink the streets and squares; let us raise the level of the city.

I COMBAT AND DESPISE:
1. All the pseudo-architecture of the avant-garde, Austrian, Hungarian, German and American;
2. All classical architecture, solemn, hieratic, scenographic, decorative, monumental, pretty and pleasing;
3. The embalming, reconstruction and reproduction of ancient monuments and places;
4. Perpendicular and horizontal lines, cubical and pyramidal forms that are static, solemn, aggressive are absolutely excluded from utterly new sensibility;
5. The use of massive, voluminous, durable, antiquated and costly materials.

AND PROCLAIM:
1. That Futurist architecture is the architecture of calculation, of audacious temerity and of simplicity; the architecture of reinforced concrete, of steel, glass, cardboard, textile fibre, and of all those substitutes for wood, stone and brick that allow us to obtain maximum elasticity and lightness;
2. That Futurist architecture is not because of this an arid combination of practicality
and usefulness, but remains art, i.e. a synthesis and expression;
3. That oblique and elliptic lines are dynamic, and by their very nature possess an emotive power a thousand times stronger than perpendiculars and horizontals. And that no integral, dynamic architecture can exist that does not include these;
3. That decoration as an element superimposed on architecture is absurd, and that THE DECORATIVE VALUE OF FUTURIST ARCHITECTURE DEPENDS SOLELY ON THE USE AND ORIGINAL ARRANGEMENT OF RAW OR BARE OR CHROMATICALLY VIOLENT MATERIALS;
4. That, just as the ancients drew inspiration for their art from elements of nature, we-who are materially and spiritually artificial-must find that inspiration in the elements of the utterly new mechanical world we have created, and of which architecture must be the most beautiful expression, the most complete synthesis, the most efficacious integration;
5. That architecture as the art of formal arrangement according to pre-established criteria is finished;
6. That by the term architecture is meant the endeavor to harmonize the environment and Humanity with freedom and great audacity, that is to transform the world of things into a direct projection of the world of the spirit;
7. No formal or linear habit can grow from an architecture conceived this way, since the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. THINGS WILL ENDURE LESS THAN US. EVERY GENERATION MUST BUILD ITS OWN CITY. This constant renovation of the architectonic environment will contribute to the Futurist victory already affirmed by WORDS-IN-FREEDOM, PLASTIC DYNAMISM, MUSIC WITHOUT QUADRATURE AND THE ART OF NOISES, and for which we fight ceaselessly against traditionalist cowardice.