UNIT 2 - CITTA NUOVA THE NEW CITY

The Citt Nuova apartment building with external

elevators, galleries, covered walkways, on three
street levels (tramlines, automobile lanes, and
pedestrian
walkway),
lamps
and
wireless
telegraph

In spring 1914 Antonio SantElia exhibited a series of drawings relating to his

utopian vision of a completely industrialized and technologically advanced Citt
Nuova (New City). These were shown at an exhibition of Lombard architects and,
two months later, at the exhibition Nuove Tendenze: Milano lano due mille (New
Tendencies: Milan the Year Two Thousand). His Messagio, a polemical statement,
printed in the catalogue, did not mention the words Futurist or Futurism, but
emphasized the need to respond to the new industrial age and to celebrate the
conditions and focal points of contemporary urban life grand hotels, railway
stations and ports. SantElia stressed that it was necessary to reinvent the city as
a dynamic entity and to construct buildings like gigantic machines.
The drawings can be linked with the Futurists celebration of speed and the
dynamism of modern life. They convey a total vision of a future metropolis in
which streets are no longer confined to ground level and in which buildings, as
tall as American skyscrapers, do not stand alone (as in New York), but are part of
an integrated urban complex. SantElias drawing style owed much to the
conventions of Viennese architecture of about 1900, especially the widely
published designs of Otto Wagner and his students. SantElias precise and
elaborately detailed ink drawings were the result of a process of preparatory
sketches and studies related to their function as exhibition drawings.
The apartment building has external elevator shafts linked to the building by a
series of bridges and covered walkways. This arrangement accentuates the
mechanistic components of the housing block, making them a dominant aspect
of the buildings facade. It is articulated with both flat and stepped-back walls
and is pierced by transportation lines and bridges, which link it directly to other
elements in the city. In this way SantElia abolished the notion of the monolithic,
free-standing building and integrated it fully into the complete urban machine.
Similarly, he fused different modes of transport (rail and air) into a single multi-

levelled structure with cable cars and elevators, again emphasizing the
mechanistic purpose of the building and its dynamic role within the life of the
city. With its symmetrical towers and colossal scale, however, it resembles a
cathedral of the future, a monument to the vision of a future way of living.