Writings – Futurist Legacy

Architectural Association School of Architecture

4^th Year Histories & Theories Submission

THE ANALOGOUS CITY

Pier Vittorio Aureli

FUTURIST LEGACY

Manifesto, Architecture and the Field

ABSTRACT

The idea of an architecture that has a degree of responsibility over its greater context within human development has become more apparent as other disciplines look to architects to solve issues contemporary to us and to future generations. This expectation and sense of duty of the architects over the built environment, in a time of global warming and depleting resources, has gone a long way since the original role of the architect and the positioning of architecture throughout the twentieth century. This appreciation of architecture, however, started as deep preoccupation from the part of a group of people that felt that the opposite was the case: architecture had no connection to advancements at the time and its human environment. This essay is an evaluation of the changing attitude towards architecture and its evolving relationship with the city. By this I seek to compare the impact of architects and theorists, in particular the Futurists, have had in pushing forward the idea of the city in a post-modern time in tandem to the developments at the time and how this trend extends to our present time.

FUTURIST IDEOLOGY

The Futurists posited the disjunction from passive traditional reproduction into an intense critical questioning of its validity and proposing a radical alternative. The Futurists break the lineage of traditional and beaux arts development of design into one of critique and serious evaluation of the modern condition and its representation by the art forms, and in turn: the built environment. Reynard Banham, in his book Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, points out: ‘The qualities which made Futurism a turning point in the development of modern theories of design were primarily ideological, and concerned with attitudes of mind, rather than formal or technical methods – though these attitudes of mind were often influential as vehicles in the transmission of formal and technical methods which were not, in the first place, Futurist invention.’ [1]

In the first part of the Foundation Manifesto, published in Le Figaro, 20^th February 1909, the total dissociation with past tendencies is made emphatic: ‘Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the deep wells of the Absurd!’[2] Noteworthy is the narrative by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti that evokes pervasive images throughout the text of industry, mechanics and most importantly: cars and speed. This point is revisited in the 4^th statement of the Manifesto: ‘we affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.’[3]

This call for speed as one of the points of the Manifesto should be contextualised with the profound changes in communication, transportation, scale and industry that at the time of its publication, the Futurists were witnessing. The introduction of the car, the lift, mass-production and mass-communications resonated deeply in the psyche of the Futurists and into the realization of the apparent non-association of the built environment with these advancements. That same moment of profound change, within a post-modern context, can be equated to the shift from, what Zygmunt Bauman calls hard modernity to soft modernity:

‘In the era of hardware, of heavy modernity, which in Max Weber’s terms was also the era of instrumental rationality, time was the means which needed to be husbanded and managed prudently so that the return of value, which were space, could be maximised; in the era of software, of light modernity, the effectiveness of time as means of value-attainment tends to approach infinity, with the paradoxical effect of levelling up (or rather down) the value of all units in the field of potential objects.’ [4]

Within this new context of shift from hard to soft modernity, fifty seven years after the Futurist Manifesto was first published in Le Figaro, again in Italy, 1966 [Fig. 1], Archizoom Associati was founded, taking on the Futurist tradition of deep revaluation of architecture’s raison d’être: ‘it is a question, therefore, of setting oneself outside of the architectural tradition seen as a formal metaphor of history, which limits to solely figurative and symbolic code its function with respect to the major questions of the contemporary urban condition.’ [5]

[Fig. 1] The Futurists, 1909, Archizoom Associati, 1966

One of the groups’ exponents, Andrea Branzi, articulated the new disjunction of architecture and the city and called for architecture of immateriality, akin to the soft-modernity contingencies. A similar call to that made by Marinetti in his Manifesto is done by Branzi, maintaining the consistencies of their respective epochs but bridging the divide that Bauman highlights in the transition between hard modernity and soft modernity:

‘The idea of an inexpressive, catatonic architecture, outcome of the expansive forms of logic of the system and its class antagonists, was the only modern architecture of interest to us: a liberating architecture, corresponding to mass democracy, devoid of demos and devoid of cratos (people and power), and both centreless and imageless.’ [6]

This homologous relationship between Futurist and Post-Modernism is a logical progression when related to developments in other fields. Twentieth century philosophy, as Gianni Vattimo points out, ‘describes the future in a way deeply tinged with the grandiose. (…) Heidegger’s definition of existence as project and transcendence to Sartre’s notion of transcendence, to Ernst Bloch’s utopianism, (…) the tension towards the future is seen as a tension aimed towards a renewal and return to a condition of ordinary authenticity.’ [7]

A degree of ahistoricity is however achieved: a desire for the new is unforeseeable yet attainable by the conventions of the time, neglecting affiliations to tradition calling for completely new dynamism. Further to this argument, Krzysztof Pomain’s essay The Crisis of the Future best describes this condition: ‘emergence of the value of the new and the constitution of the modern state.’[8] Whilst Pomain focuses on the macro socioeconomic aspect of the modern state, the constituencies of the modern state of a post-modern era bring forth the sensation of dissolution present at the time of the Futurist Manifesto: ‘From architecture to the novel to poetry to the figurative arts, the post-modern displays, as it most common and more imposing trait, an effort to free itself from the logic of overcoming, development, and innovation.’ [9]

FUTURIST ARCHITECTURE

Besides the ideological qualities than Banham gives to the influence of Futurism over post-modernism thought, Futurist aesthetics defined in Boccioni [Fig. 2], Marinetti, Carra, Russolo, Balla and Severini Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting [Fig. 2] borrows the cubist thematic of planar replication. Banham in his chapter Futurism: theory and development explains: ‘The Cubists from whom they acquired this device were the Groupe de Puteaux, a group centring round the Duchamp family, on the fringe of the Picasso/Braque circle. The Puteaux group were to make more than one contribution to the development of modern design, and what they could offer to the Futurists at this point was an intellectual and diagrammatic approach to painting, rather than the intuitive and quasi-representational approach of Braque and Picasso.’ [10] This same property of multiplicity of planes is taken on by Futurist Architecture and evolves into a stage that successfully addresses the combination of machine, human interface and built environment advocated to a point that maintains relevancy within post-modern and contemporary architecture.

[Fig. 2] Umberto Boccioni, La Strada entra nella casa, 1911

The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture published in 1914 by Antonio Sant’Elia continues the format of “fighting against” and “declaring” of his futurist colleagues other manifestoes and continue the line of thought prioritising the advent of a new order. His 5^th point:

‘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 effacious integration.’ [11]

[Fig 3]: La Citta Nuova, Antonio Sant’Elia, 1914

Sant’Elia’s shares the principles of planar replication through mass groupings and superimpositions [Fig. 3]:‘Broader concerns of bold groupings and masses, and large-scale disposition of planes.’[12] He also reaffirms the core Futurist trait of speed as essential in the new aesthetic: ‘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.’[13] Moreover, a specific call for materials that ought to be employed is called upon: the use of reinforced concrete, iron, glass, textile, cardboard, all alternative materials to the conventional. What Sant’Elia criticised was the use of modern materials like iron being disguised with traditional ones. Deane and Woodward’s Oxford Museum of Natural History [Fig. 4] would be an example of the incompatibility of two technologies that Sant’Elia criticised: the iron gothic ceiling with columns covered in brick and marble akin to the Gothic tradition, a veil of revisionist Ruskinian aesthetics and, consequently, revivalist trend that could later be advocated (e.g. Prince of Wales 1984 Carbuncle speech). The purity of the new Futurist order remains true to the technological potential of the time.

[Fig. 4]: Deane & Woodward’s Oxford Museum Interior, James O’Shea working on the exterior details

The fascination with the new culture of speed and the machine gave way to a development of an architecture that fitted accordingly to this emerging urbanity. The drawings of Sant’Elia are speculations on what could be a new symbiotic aesthetic between man and machine. In particular: La Citta Nuova.

Sanford Kwinter writes in his Architecture of Time on La Citta Nuova: ‘La Citta Nuova is a system, then, with no inside or outside, no centre and no periphery, but with merely one virtual circulating substance – force – and its variety of actualized modes – linear, rotation, ascending, combining, transecting.’ [14] Sant’Elia’s takes Boccioni’s plastic zones concept explained by Banham as: arrangements of materials in the generic sense – formless, random multiplicities. There is now only world-substance – an indeterminate and a centred aggregate of different materials – no longer “ideal” form, transcendent yet made incarnate in “sublime” or notable material. Further advancement in urban scenarios of densities and interconnections produced by Sant’Elia’s work resulted in the development of field conditions which were rooted from the fluidity and juxtaposition of elements that borrowed from Puteaux Group principles, Boccioni’s field theorems and the interpretation of the machinic context. Kwinter marks the point of transition from theory to execution in Sant’Elia’s drawings by linking the principles of fluidity to the ideas explored by contemporary physicists at the time that lead to advancements in understanding of fluid dynamics and hypothesis of universal motion. Again, Boccioni explored this notion of field condition as a ‘field of consistency (…) the unique form that gives continuity to space.’

Just as Vattimo contextualised Futurist ideals in relation to the contemporary philosophies at the time, Kwinter acknowledges the input of philosophers in other fields like Henri Bergsons and Edmund Husserl in the defining the influence of fluid systems from Sant’Elia’s work. Bergons: ‘Insistence on the non-discrete nature of the contents of consciousness and on the systematic dissolution of spatial from in the fluid multiplicity of duree.’[15] And Husserl’s: ‘[work on] dynamic of (ap)perception by extending the intentional horizon (perceptual field)_ to the vector of internal time consciousness so that a perceived object (noema) – already defined as partial and contingent in space – was further relativized in a temporal complex o retained and anticipated images’[16]. Kwinter considers Sant’Elia as the only Futurist that fully grasped the notion of dynamics beyond the initial metaphorical reference to the car and to speed. Sant’Elia later used La Citta Nuova for projects to redesign Milan Central Station. These proposals continue the large-scale studies of the emerging metropolis. Kwinter concludes:

‘The Milan station becomes less a “building” than a field of convergence and linkup for many system of flows,  including air transport, trains, cars, radio signals, trams, funiculars, pedestrians, and necessarily all the secondary flows they host – money, good, information. In this sense, the “station” comes to be seen as an allegorical representation of the city itself, and necessarily, in terms of the transformation of “place” into a swinging manifold of circuitry, switching points and de-territorialized, non-grounded flows.’[17]

FUTURIST FIELDS

Sant’Elia’s work is the antecedent for Branzis’ No-Stop City. In the case of Archizoom, No-Stop City [Fig. 5] is described by Branzi as ‘a system based on the repetition of signs, at once diffuse and fluid, within which and nature, like so many exceptions and incidents, dissolved and disappeared into the amniotic space of metropolises.’ [18] The same fluidity present in Sant’Elia is continued in Branzi’s work, where the same condition of technological and urban disjunction is present. Branzi’s context is one of an ‘urban condition […] made up of services, information technologies networks, product systems, environmental componential practice, microclimates, commercial information, and above all perceptive structures that produce systems of sensorial and intelligent tunnels that are contained within architecture, but cannot be represented by architecture’s figurative codes.’ [19] To this, No-Stop City proposes a field architecture, ‘a city without architecture’[20], a model with mirrors that reflected the model, multiplying, generating a field condition, a metropolis was a large interior, a single space, air-conditioned and artificially lit. [21] The soft-modernity finds an experimental model of execution in No-Stop City, bearing all the traits of a liquefied society, as Bauman points out: “individualized, privatized modernity, in which the onus of connecting the dots and the responsibility of failure fall mainly on the shoulders of the individual.”[22]

[Fig. 5] No-Stop City

Whilst futurist painting drew from the Puteaux group its planar replication which then got translated into an aggregate of parts and field systems with Sant’Elias work, Branzi’s concept of field sprouts from the appreciation of the aggregates of parts and their autonomies, the ‘society of functionoids’[23]. They all share an underlying premise of, as Banham explains, “the combination of the system theory of the urban realm with its dynamic interpretation as a pressurized field gives rise to an assembly language based on impregnation, with system elements existing simultaneously, and at least virtually, everywhere, emerging to actualization only within nodes (conjunction) of mutually interfering systems.”[24] The Futurists call for a reassessment of the relationship between architectural design and its urban/technological context. Found in a pragmatic and systematic application the development of field conditions that addressed the precise conundrum of disjunction that the manifesto published in Le Figaro in 1909 originally announced.

Going back to a theoretical appreciation of the field and its application in architecture and the city, Stan Allen’s writing on field conditions is of particular relevance. Post-Minimalist artists (e.g. Barry Le Va), just as Puteaux group cubism tapped into planar replication, tap into field conditions as means to ‘empty the artwork of its figurative or decorative character in order to foreground its architectural condition. The construction of meaning was displaced from the object itself to the spatial field between the viewer and the object: a fluid zone of perceptual interference, populated by moving bodies.’ [25] The work of the post-Minimalist further matures the idea of multiplicity and aggregate of parts derived from Sant’Elia’s work, focusing on local relationships rather than overall form: “The generation of form through sequence of events is […] related to the generative rules for flock behaviour or algebraic combination.”[26]

Allen elaborates on the superposition of fields through moirés and other diagrammatic representation of mats in order to diversify the potential application of these logics in architecture. Allen’s essay Infrastructural Urbanism offers a hint on the application of field architecture:

‘Infrastructures organize and manage complex system of flow, movement, and exchange. Effects of scale (a capillary effect when the elements get very numerous and very small) and effects of synergy (when system overlap and interchange), both of which tend to produce field conditions that disrupt the overall tendency of infrastructural system to organize themselves in linear fashion.’ [27]

He also associates the moiré [Fig. 6] to the surface, which, paired with infrastructure and the dynamics of the field, result in as much a Sant’Elian concoction as a true post-modernist definition for a city that changes in increasingly frenetic leaps:

“The field is fundamentally a horizontal phenomenon – even a graphic one.[…] Although certain post-modern cities (Tokyo for example] [Fig. 7] might be characterized as fully three dimensional fields, the prototypical cities of the late twentieth century are distinguished by horizontal extension. What these fields combinations seem to promise in this context is a thickening and intensification of experience at specified moments within the extended field of the city.”[28]

[Fig. 6] A Moire

[Fig. 7] Tokyo

The relevance of field conditions in our current time of Baunian soft modernity, Vattimo’s “no-time” space, Sant’Elian aggregate of components and infrastructures, instant telecommunications, mass market, global economies, depleting resources, resides in its potential to deliver means for a processing of such dynamic conditions that the Futurist foresaw within their own fin de siècle context in the dawn of the 20^th century and that we are reliving amidst the dawn of our 21^st century city.

CONCLUSION

The city seen as relationships between us and the built environment, let alone as a design issue, exceeds the discipline of architecture in all levels, which is why potentially it is architecture the one discipline that could claim success in defining the city on its own terms. The Futurists and post-modernists have shown how through cross-disciplinary studies of this relationship with the city and working in parallel with other fields, a sensitive and acute understanding of the city is extracted. Examples shown of theories and movements that have shaped an understanding of the city through architecture maintaining as constant the relationship between man and technology demonstrate the potential, and to an extent success, of these thinkers in constantly revaluating and positing critically the city and the impact contemporary technology has on it and vice-versa. The systematic approach some movements have had in embracing all aspects of human design reproduction in an attempt to revoke, to “combat and despise” and “to proclaim” new principles relevant to its contemporary context, defines the tendency on which the city has always been subject to questioning. 

The progression of aesthetics development from the Futurist Manifesto, Puteaux Group cubism, La Citta Nuova, Archizoom Associati’s No-Stop City, Barry Le Va, and field buildings orbits around the same underlying premise of a state of multiplicity and continuity, of aggregate and individuality of the components. The superimposition of planes at the spatial, temporal and political level and its dissolution was anticipated by Branzi as the goal of the No-Stop City:

‘A society freed from its own alienation, emancipated from the rhetorical forms of humanitarian socialism and rhetorical progressivism: an architecture which took a fearless look at the logic of grey, atheistic and de-dramatized industrialism, where mass production produced infinite urban decors, stripped of those temperamental structures which described as inhibiting restrictions, hampering the liberation of means organic energy.’ [29]

At the level of the city, the speculation of a built environment responsive and sensitive to its technological and political context has had various manifestations yet, the 4^th Futurist point from their first Manifesto has become a constant throughout: speed and dynamism. The formats on which these themes have occurred are different as in 1909, cars and planes where the most recognisable motifs, but by 1966 and 21^st century, mass communications and the instantaneity that softwares gives us in our daily lives also relate to Marinetti’s initial statement. The development of Futurism throughout the 20^th century and its relevancy in various stages of the century undoubtedly owed to this underlying thematic. The eventual theories and design strategies that sprouted from the appreciation and execution towards bridging that hard to soft modernity gap populate the past and continue to exist in this century.

Branzi summarised the aim of architectures in regards to this transition from one state of the city to another liquefied state:

‘Otherwise put, offering a hospitable world to a society which, on the contrary, was busy looking for new kinds inhospitable and disorganization, so as to go beyond the temperamental limits of its own development.’ [30]

The irreversible globalisation of our cities and proliferation of technologies in every aspect of our lives, of its miniaturisation and pervasiveness, is the main reason for the state Branzi highlights to be the aim of contemporary architects dealing with the emerging new city. Field architecture is one method of engaging this new condition and it owes to the critical questioning made by Archizoom and by the Futurists earlier in the past century.

The ultimate seductiveness and relevancy that the Futurist will have in later manifestations of the shaping of our cities comes more from their utopianism rather than from the, whilst as progressive, architectural executions. Colin Rowe states:

“It might be more reasonable and more modest to recognize that, in the opening years of this century, great revolutions in thought occurred and that then profound visual discoveries resulted, that these are still unexplained, and rather than assume intrinsic change to be the prerogative of every generation, it might be more useful to recognize that certain changes are so enormous as to impose a directive which cannot be resolved in any individual life span.”[31]

It is evident that we are still undergoing those changes first hinted at the beginning of the 20^th century which makes Futurism all too relevant nowadays. It is however, the critical nature of the Futurists, regardless of the problematic they unravelled that I would personally consider to be the greatest legacy: a systematic critique to the order of the city and our relationship with it in regards to our own advancements and our own achievements in other fields as a new standard for architectural research. Whether due to their ideological stance or aesthetic, Futurism will continue to serve as permanent reference of the moment when the citizen looked at the city and decided to revert its growth from outward repetition, into customized, individuated and infinitely proliferated new order.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALLEN, Stan

Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City

Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, New York

AGREST, Diana

Stan Allen – Practice: Architecture, technique and representation

Amsterdam, G+B, 2000

APOLLONIO, Umbro

Futurist Manifesto

London, Thames and Hudson, 1973

BANHAM, Reynard

Theory and Design in the First Machine Age

Glasgow, The Architectural Press London, 1960

BAUMAN, Zygmunt

Liquid Modernity

Cambridge (UK), Polity Press, 2000

BRANZI, Andrea

Weak and Diffuse Modernity: the World of Projects at the beginning of the 21^st Century

Milan, Skira, 2006

BRANZI, Andrea,

No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati

Paris, Blanchard-Printing, 2000

EISENMAN, Peter,

Diagram Diaries

Thames & Hudson, 1999, London

KWINTER, Sanford,

Architecture of Time

VATTIMO, Gianni

The End of Modernity

Cambridge (UK), Polity Press, 1988

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[1] BANHAM, Reynard, “Theory and Design in the First Machine Age”, The Architectural Press London, 1960, The University Press Glasgow, United Kingdom, p. 99

[2] APOLLONIO, Umbro, “Futurist Manifesto”, Thames and Hudson, 1973, Great Britain, p. 20

[3] Ibid., p. 21

[4] BAUMAN, Zygmunt, “Liquid Modernity”, Polity Press, 2000, Cambridge, UK, p. 118.

[5] BRANZI, Andrea, “Weak and Diffuse Modernity : The World of Projects at the beginning of the 21^st Century”, Skira, Milan, 2006, p. 9

[6] BRANZI, Andrea, “No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati”, Paris, Blanchard Press, 200, pp.148-149.

[7] VATTIMO, Gianni, “The End of Modernity”, Cambridge (UK), Polity Press, 1988, p. 104

[8] Loc. Cit.

[9] Ibid., p. 105

[10] BANHAM, Reynard, Op. Cit., p. 110

[11] APOLLONIO, Umbro, Op. Cit., p. 172.

[12] Ibid., p. 171

[13] Ibid., p. 170

[14] KWINTER, Sanford, “Architecture of Time”, p.96

[15] Ibid., p. 54.

[16] Loc. Cit.

[17] Ibid., p.86.

[18] BRANZI, Andrea, “No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati”, p.150.

[19] BRANZI, Andrea, “Weak and Diffuse Modernity : The World of Projects at the beginning of the 21^st Century”,  p. 9

[20] BRANZI, Andrea “No-Stop City”, p.153.

[21] Ibid. p. 151.

[22] BRANZI, Andrea, “Weak and Diffuse Modernity : The World of Projects at the beginning of the 21^st Century”, p. 21

[23] Ibid. p, 10.

[24] KWINTER, Sanford, Op. Cit., p.82

[25] ALLEN, Stan, “Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City”, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999, p. 95.

[26] Ibid., p. 97.

[27] Ibid., p. 55.

[28] Ibid., p. 98.

[29] BRANZI, Andrea, “No-Stop City”, p.149

[30] BRANZI, Andrea, Op. Cit., p. 155.

[31] EISENMAN, Peter, “Diagram Diaries”, Thames & Hudson, 1999, London.