Collective imagination of Antonio Sant'Elia's Città Nuova

Giornata di studio Bernardo Secchi Utopia and the Project for the City and Territory Collective imagination of Antonio Sant’Elia’s Città Nuova Nicola Barbugian Università Iuav di Venezia [email protected] [email protected] Antonio Sant’Elia’s project for a future city opens a new season for architecture where utopia and the image of a city are inseparable. Between the 19th and 20th century several architects studied their contemporary city and its possible improvement through changes of existing models, but still no one had suggested a brand new configuration for the city of the future. The design process of the Città Nuova is a metonymic process through which Sant’Elia transfers knowledge and learning from one field of interest to another: his cultural roots involve ideas and visions taken from various contexts such as the first science fiction literature or American illustrations. If architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space we can consider Antonio Sant’Elia a simultaneous interpreter of thoughts and images that he decided to translate into architecture using the tools of drawing. Nevertheless this architecture is unbuilt, it is pure image. Collective Imagination of an era The early twentieth century was a season of major renewal. In Italy the Futurist movement played an emblematic role because of its systematic tendency to establish relationships with different disciplines, its ability to announce programs before the production of artworks, its propensity to attract the audience with provocative proposals in every field of life. On July 11th 1914, architecture officially provided its contribution to the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe (as Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero will name it in 1915), through a theoretical manifesto written in a desecrating language. The Manifesto contained also a group of drawings of iconic future architectures signed by architect Antonio Sant'Elia, aged twenty-six [fig.1]. The young architect and his unbuilt project of the Città Nuova (New City, 1914) play a key role in the definition of the contemporary metropolitan collective imagination, where the themes of infrastructures and connections between the different parts of the city are fundamental. At first sight these architectures look like a sequence of single elements or evocative independent shots, but then we realize that we are in front of an organic project, conceived and conveyed through the instrument of drawing. These intense images of a rising1 city convey the feeling of a too transgressive utopia, far away from everyday life. A city that is no longer anchored to the ground: the Città Nuova denies the ground placing itself - and its fragile viaducts and suspended walkways - on a tabula rasa. Every movement or cultural trend feeds on images of its age, elements we usually define as collective imagination of an era. Today, in a society based on images quickly transmitted by mass media, this is an unavoidable fact, but it was common also a hundred years ago when knowledge and images were shared exclusively through printed items (books, illustrated magazines, newspapers) and began to be spread through photography and movies even at a ‘popular’ level. In fact the image, in addition to its exterior appearance, has a deep symbolic meaning that catches the eye of the observer and penetrates into his mind in an unconscious way. Tendencies and artistic movements were inevitably influenced by images. Without any doubt Futurism was one of these movements. In particular, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, with his exotic and visionary prose, made a large use of this popular imagery. Imagery coming from literature and the view of drawings and illustrations that influenced many artists of the movement in the following years. Science Fiction Literature As pointed out by Carlo Ragghianti (1963), science fiction was a true creative source for the young architect. A mass cultural phenomenon ranging from literature to comics, including commercials of futuristic or fictitious technologies. On May 20th 1914, the first exhibition of the group Nuove Tendenze takes place in Milan. Alongside works by various Milanese artists, Antonio Sant’Elia presents for the very first time sixteen of the drawings of the Città Nuova attracting the public’s attention.2 The subtitle of the exhibition, Milano l’anno 2000 (Milan 2000), reminds of the book by Antoine Moilin Paris, l’an 2000 (Paris, year 2000) published in 1869. A visionary novel in which Moilin, doctor, politician and writer, describes a French capital where a Socialist revolution already happened. The progress of science changed not only the buildings of the city, but also the whole social life with a real program of full reorganization of the society. 1 The term ‘rising’ refers to the painting La città che sale (The City Rises, 1910) by Umberto Boccioni in which the author dynamically emphasizes the human work used to realize the modern city shaped on the future man’s [fig.2]. 2 The exhibition Nuove Tendenze (New Trends) took place in Milan from May 20th to June 10th 1914 in via Agnello 8. The other artists taking part in the exhibition were Leonardo Dudreville, Mario Chiattone, Carlo Erba, Achille Funi, John Poss, Adriana Bisi Fabbri, Marcello Nizzoli and Alma Fidora. 1 Giornata di studio Bernardo Secchi Utopia and the Project for the City and Territory Marinetti knew Moilin’s work thanks to his Parisian poet friend Gustave Kahn. This novel was perfectly part of a context in which many writers wondered what the future looked like anticipating hypothetical scenarios of life in the metropolis. At the beginning of his book Moilin describes the construction of a network of ruesgalleries, covered passageways that are connected through suspended bridges. The second operation, closer to the visions of Antonio Sant’Elia, is the construction of the new maisons-modèles: in the new isolated block of buildings - crossed by a network of services in the lower floors - the upper floors containing apartments overlooking the street. These floors are served by blocks of stairs on the sides of the building and by a mechanical elevator that goes down to the basement. Moilin still considers the elevator a technological device for the distribution of goods and not of human beings. The different social classes are not separated, so the new houses are not divided in categories for rich or poor people. It’s curious how Moilin suggests a distribution of the inhabitants in different districts according to their lifestyles: “Il y a des rues qui ne sont habitées que par des gens tranquilles, mariés et où tout le monde est couché à 9 heures. D’autres maisons sont au contraire vouées au célibat, au plaisir, au bruit, et souvent on y passe les nuits à chanter et à boire sans que les voisins osent s’en plaindre, car chacun d’eux à son tour se rend coupable du même délit ” 3 (Moilin 1869). Radial railway lines occupy the broad boulevards bordered by new construction houses. Not in trenches, but in elevated viaducts of incredible audacity (hardiesse étonnante) that keep the different flows of cars and pedestrian perfectly separated. This characteristic feature of the city draws an endless straight line to the horizon. Popular literature was extremely active between 1890 and 1910 producing works of a futurism that we could define not just pseudo-scientific, but also unrestrained and almost baroque. Two names in particular: Jules Verne (1828-1905) and Albert Robida (1848-1926). Verne, more interested in technical and scientific topics, dealt with the urban-architectural problem in two novels only: Les cinq cent millions de la Bégun in 1879 and L’étonnant aventure de la mission Barsac, released in 1914 after his death. In the first book, the two main characters build two utopian cities: the German city-factory of Stahlstadt and the French aerial-city of France-Ville. In the second novel, a French expedition in Niger discovers the secret city of Blackland, where amazing inventions – not for the good of humanity, but to conquer it - were developed. These are not the vertical cities of futurism, but they remind us - with a negative accent - of the new factories, power plants, phalansteries and prisons as regards their structure and organization. Albert Robida instead is an interesting case study for being a satirical illustrator and a caricaturist too. Its architectural imagery is illustrated in three works: Le vingtième siècle (1882), La vie électrique (1891-92) and the album La guerre au vingtième siècle (1887) [fig.3]. Robida describes with texts and drawings - of grotesque irony dense cities of skyscrapers dotted with windows, adorned with antennas, connected by scaffolds and viaducts, with platforms and jutting terraces, with people living and working outside, almost in the air [fig.4]. Marinetti publishes, within his collection Guerra sola igiene del mondo (1915), the text La guerra elettrica (Electric War, 1910) which seems to refer to Robida’s novels. The subtitle says: ‘futuristic vision-hypothesis’. Thus the text begins: “Oh! Come invidio gli uomini che nasceranno fra un secolo nella mia bella penisola, interamente vivificata, scossa e imbrigliata dalle nuove forze elettriche”.4 People don’t live on the ground anymore: “l’uomo, divenuto aereo, vi posa il piede solo di tanto in tanto! ”.5 It is therefore electricity that gives life to the earth, to the sky and even to the man himself: the short text by Marinetti seems almost an answer to the novel Le meraviglie del Duemila (The wonders of 2000, 1907) in which on the contrary the hapless heroes of Emilio Salgari wake up in the XXI century and die after a few hours because of the air electrification to which they are not accustomed. The novels of Herbert George Wells begin to be translated into Italian in 1901. In particular, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) appeared translated in 1907 under the title Quando il dormiente si sveglierà. It is a socio-political vision of the future in which Wells describes the architecture of the future city that will influence Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) [fig.5]. Wells tells the story of a man who wakes up in London in 2100. The city is dominated by some kind of mechanical titanism: “His first impression was of overwhelming architecture. The place into which he looked was an aisle of titanic buildings, curving spaciously in either direction. […] Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and the opposite facade was grey and dim and broken by great archings, circular perforations, balconies, buttresses, turret projections, myriads of vast windows, and an intricate scheme of architectural relief. […] This roadway was three hundred feet across, and it moved; it moved, all save the middle, the lowest part. […] Under the balcony this 3 “There are streets that are inhabited only by quiet or married people, where everyone goes to bed at 9pm. On the contrary, other houses are dedicated to celibacy, pleasure, noise, and often people spend the nights there singing and drinking without the neighbors dare to complain, because each one of them is guilty of the same crime in turn”. Translated by the author. 4 “Oh! How I envy the men who will be born in a century in my beautiful peninsula, completely revitalized, shocked and harnessed by the new electrical forces”. Translated by the author. 5 “The man, who became aerial, poses his foot hardly ever!” Translated by the author. 2 Giornata di studio Bernardo Secchi Utopia and the Project for the City and Territory extraordinary roadway ran swiftly […] an endless flow rushing along as fast as a nineteenth century express train, an endless platform of narrow transverse overlapping slats with little interspaces” (Wells 1898, chapter V). At the turn of the 20th century a sort of ‘futuristic feeling’ was quite common among the different social classes. Futurism theorists gathered the atmosphere spread in numerous publications and brought popular literature to a culturally higher level thanks to the use of strong iconic images. Architectural and urban images first. American Illustrations American magazines of the early 1910s offered a scenario of images similar to the one proposed by science fiction novels [fig.6]. In those years, representations of New York City seen like a megalopolis - whose urban density develops in height because of the lack of building land - are widely distributed through newspapers and magazines. A New York City, however, coming from fantasy, clearly different from the real forest of neo-Romanesque and Renaissance skyscrapers of Manhattan. A futuristic New York more than the real one, especially in regards to the disproportionate increase in traffic. Charles Lamb’s drawings for a city on many levels are surely visionary references for the young Antonio Sant’Elia; drawings where vehicular traffic is relegated to the lower levels, while the pedestrian paths occupy the higher ones. In 1908, King Moses publishes the King’s views of New York guide. A guide containing four hundred illustrations ending with an image titled King’s Dream of New York [fig.7], designed by Harry M. Petit, in which the metropolis and its inner complex movement are seen from an elevated point of view, a skyscraper window probably. Tall buildings are at the same time scenes and characters of the same shot, where balloons, airships and airplanes move through the air with a certain disorder. Looking down into the canyon between the skyscrapers is even more interesting: a dense network of trains and trams is placed in the central part of the road while metal catwalks are suspended hundreds of meters above the ground connecting the two fronts of the buildings. The influential Milanese magazine L’Illustrazione Italiana gave space to one of these images published by Scientific American in the United States. In 1914 a preparatory sketch by Antonio Sant’Elia shows his clear understanding not only of the theme, but also of the original published images. The idea of overlapped traffic networks appears with more strength in 1913, when L’Illustrazione Italiana publishes a perspective cross-section of the project of the Grand Central Station in New York by Reed, Stem, Warren and Wetmore [fig.8]. In February 1913, its opening attracted many people thanks to the masterful solution given to such intricate problem as the hub of various types of traffic networks. The cross-section shows a complex assembly of train tracks, pedestrian ramps and elevated streets situated at multiple levels. A real city within the city with several facilities, designed to serve simultaneously different groups of travelers: passengers of long journey buses, people arriving in New York from distant cities and 250.000 commuters a day. In the same year, 1913, another similar image was published in L’Illustrazione Italiana. Its title was The Circulation of the Future and Cloudscrapers of New York [fig.9]. This drawing is rendered according to one-point perspective and bird’s-eye view showing a city of tall buildings topped by towers, “an eclectic historicist parade” (Cerviere 2004). A comparison between this drawing and Sant’Elia’s preparatory sketches [fig.10] seems mandatory, not only because of the perspective point of view. Similarities are evident: they both show a broad central street, lined with tall buildings that stretch to the horizon. Vehicular traffic occupies the lowest levels in the middle, while the paths for pedestrians are situated to both sides of the upper levels. Some bridges allow the passage from one side to the other, elevators and stairways convey people from the lower to the upper levels. This continuum, based on the interconnection of buildings, would provide the principle of urban and architectural unity of the Città Nuova. The canyon effect used by these American illustrators was already typical of a genre of photography: the documentary photography, in fact, used it widely to represent New York City since the fifties of the nineteenth century. This effect would influence then the art of Western avant-garde, Antonio Sant’Elia included of course. A positive image If “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space” (Mies Van der Rohe 1923) we can consider Antonio Sant’Elia a simultaneous6 interpreter of thoughts and images that he decided to translate into architecture through the tools of drawing. The Città Nuova conveys a positive image of a city where big social expectations met a new technical potential. With its positivism, partly coming from the first science fiction novels, this new city by Antonio Sant’Elia promotes the growth of social equality through architectures designed with the help of new instruments coming from the “nuovissimo mondo meccanico” (Sant’Elia 1914).7 6 7 ‘Simultaneity’ is also a key word for the Italian futurists, for visual artists in particular. “Brand new mechanical world”. 3 Giornata di studio Bernardo Secchi Utopia and the Project for the City and Territory The great strength and the lasting legacy of the work of Sant'Elia are consequences of this pervasive rhetoric, visual and verbal, solidified in a set of heterogeneous sources. The young and restless architect draws on his board forward-looking gestures, free from the tradition, opening a season in which utopia and project of the future city are two overlapped concepts. An image able to survive in the future because it is only sketched on the paper, never built, so immaculate. Bibliography Banham, R. (1970) Theory and design in the First machine age. London: Architectural Press. Canella, G. (1983) ‘Antonio Sant’Elia e la tradizione dell’architettura lombarda’, in Canella, G. (2010) Architetti italiani nel novecento, Milano: Marinotti. Cerviere, G. (2004) Antonio Sant’Elia: La mia prospettiva interiore, Melfi: Librìa. Da Costa Meyer, E. (1995) The work of Antonio Sant’Elia: Retreat into the future, New Haven: Yale University Press. Marinetti, F. T. (1915) Guerra sola igiene del mondo, collection of manifestoes. Mies Van der Rohe, L. (1923) G. n.1, translated from the German by Philip Johnson in Johnson, P. (1947) Mies Van der Rohe, New York: Museum of Modern Art. Portoghesi, P. (1971) ‘Il linguaggio di Sant’Elia’, Controspazio, 4/5, 27-30. Ragghianti, C. L. (1963) ‘Sant’Elia: il Bibbiena del duemila’, Critica d’Arte, n. 56, December. Rowe, C. (1959) ‘The Architecture of Utopia”, in Rowe, C. (1976) The mathematics of the ideal villa and other essays, Cambridge, MA: M.i.t. P. Sant’Elia, A. (1914) ‘Architettura futurista. Manifesto’, Lacerba, 15. Wells, H. G. (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes [fig.1] Antonio Sant’Elia, Casamento con ascensori esterni, galleria, passaggio coperto, su tre piani stradali (linea tramviaria, strada per automobili, passerella metallica), fari e telegrafia senza fili [building with external elevators, gallery, covered path, on three street levels (tram line, automotive street, metal walkway), lights and wireless telegraphy], perspective view, 1914. [fig.2] Umberto Boccioni, La città che sale (The City Rises), 1910. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. 4 Giornata di studio Bernardo Secchi Utopia and the Project for the City and Territory [fig.3] Albert Robida, book cover of Le vingtième siècle, 1882. [fig.4] Albert Robida, drawing from La vie électrique, 1891-92. [fig.5] Frame from the movie Metropolis by Fritz Lang, 1926. 5 Giornata di studio Bernardo Secchi Utopia and the Project for the City and Territory [fig.6] Richard Rummel, Future New York, 1911. [fig.7] Harry M. Petit, King’s dream of New York, 1908. [fig.8] Reed, Stem, Warren e Wetmore, Grand Central Station, cross-section, 1912, in L’Illustrazione italiana, February 1st 1913. 6 Giornata di studio Bernardo Secchi Utopia and the Project for the City and Territory [fig.9] The Circulation of the Future and Cloudscrapers of New York, in L’Illustrazione Italiana, August 31st 1913. [fig.10] Antonio Sant’Elia, Studio per via secondaria con ascensori e passerelle pedonali a vari livelli [Study for a secondary road with elevators and walkways on multiple levels] around 1914. 7