3 juin 2022
https://www.openedition.org/12554 , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Scott Budzynski, « The Spatialization of Avant-Garde Consciousness: Antonio Sant’Elia’s Città Nuova and the Experience of Modernity in Italy », Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, ID : 10.4000/books.pupo.15650
In 1914 the Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia completed a series of drawings titled La città nuova and wrote the “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture” in which it is stated that every generation should have its own city. Concentrating on Sant’Elia and his visual and textual ideas of the new city, this essay discusses the relationship between a sense of the new and the avant-garde generation in Italy. Sant’Elia’s new city is understood as a generational consciousness of the changes of modernity in Italy, particularly in the context of Milan. The city is suggested here as a mental holding space, projecting beyond the built environment into a future to come. La città nuova gave visual form to the forces of modernity experienced in Milan, such as feelings of speed and change coupled with technological advancements and was completed on the cusp of World War I, which itself was initially envisioned as an opportunity for the realization of the Futurists’ artistic-social ideals.