FUTURISM

   Futurism, a modern art movement, originating among Italian artists in 1909, when Filippo Marinetti's first appearance of a manifesto published on the front page of the February 20, 1909 issue of Le Figaro, until the end of World War I. It was the very first manifesto of this kind. Marinetti summed up the major principles of Futurists in the publish.
   Futurist movement was presented as a modernist movement celebrating the technological, future era. The car, the plane, the industrial town were representing the modern life and the technological triumph of man over nature. Some of these ideas, specially the use of modern materials and technique, were taken up later by Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887-1968), the cubist, constructivist, and the dadaist.
   
    Futurism in Paint 
   The Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive style and subject matter. They used the techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, which had been originally created by Giovanni Segantini and others.
   The Futurist painters also adopted the methods of the Cubists. Cubism offered them a means of analysing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism. These painters often painted urban scenes. For example, Umberto Boccioni's "The City Rises" represents scenes of construction and manual labour with a huge, rearing red horse in the centre foreground, which workmen struggle to control.

THE CITY RISES by UMBERTO BOCCIONI

   Futurism in Architecture

   Futurist architects were sometimes at odds with the Fascists state's tendency towards Roman imperial-classical aesthetic patterns. Nevertheless, several futurist buildings were built in the years 1920-1940, including public buildings such as railway stations, maritime resorts and post offices. Example of Futurists buildings still in use today are Trento's railway station, built by Angiolo Mazzoni, and the Santa Maria Novella station in Florence.

AN EXAMPLE OF FUTURIST ARCHITECTURE
by ANTONIO SEN'ELIA

   Futurism was a largely Italian movement, although it also had adherents in other countries, France and most notably Russia. Close to Futurism with its inspirations and motivations was Pricisionism, an important development of American Modernism. Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism.

   Main representatives of this movement: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carra, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo, David Burliuk, Ilya Zdanevich, Olga Rozanova.

   ANTONIO SENT'ELIA

   He was an architect being closely related to futurist movement. His designs featured groupings and large-scale disposition of planes and masses creating a heroic industrial expressionism. His vision was for a highly industrialised and mechanized city of the future, which he saw not as a mass of induvidual buildings but a vast, multi-level, interconnected and integrated urban conurbation designed around the "life" of the city. 

"LA CITTA NUOVA"  PEREPECTIVE DRAWING
by ANTONIO SENT'ELIA

   His extremely influential designs featured vast, monolithis skyscraper buildings with terraces, bridges and aerial walkways that embodied the sheer excitement of modern architecture and technology. Even in this excitement for technology and modernity, in Sant'elias's monumentalism, however, can be found elements of Art Nouvaeu architect Giuseppe Sommaruga.