In Peter and Linda Murray’s ‘Dictionary of Art and Artists’ (first published by Penguin books in the 1960s) futurism gets a rough ride, being described by them as one of the dullest and most mediocre of all artistic movements.

Opinions have changed a little bit since then. Yet futurism poses considerable problems even today, particularly with regard to its prevailing ideology of violence, speed, destruction of tradition, espousal of war as a method of social hygene and extreme right wing views such as fascism.

Futurism did champion the latest technology including aeroplanes, power stations and motor cars.  However, its repudiation of previous artistic movements as largely worthless remains quite unacceptable today particularly since concepts such as conservation and preservation have assumed critical importance.

Possibly the most original notion of the futurists was to publicise their movement through manifestos laying down their axioms. No other artistic association had ever done this before, not even the impressionists.

Futurists were keen for Italy to enter the Great War and regain homelands. Sadly, two of their most gifted exponents, Boccioni and Sant’Elia, lost their lives in the bloody conflict. I was especially keen to see Sant’Elia’s original drawing of his ‘ideal city’ at the recent, superbly organized, Palazzo Blu exhibition devoted to futurism at Pisa, since this prophetic architect has very few completed buildings to his credit, although his images inspired a new generation of Italian architects including Michelucci, chief designer of Florence’s fabulous Santa Maria Novella railway station, perhaps the finest example of futurist architecture.

Antonio Sant’Elia was born in 1888 in Como.

In 1903 he completed his technical studies and in 1906 graduated as master builder. Becoming friends with the sculptor Girolamo Fontana and Carlo Care Sant’Elia attended cultural environments such as the Caffè Cova where he met Umberto Boccioni. His first major commission was the Villa Elisi in San Maurizio near Como in 1911.

In 1913, Sant’Elia opened an architectural studio in Milan and designed the tomb for Gerardo Caprotti in Monza’s Urban Cemetery.

In 1914 he presented his drawings for an ‘Ideal City’. Among these were designs for an airport, a train station, and a power plant. In the same year Sant’Elia contributed to a “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture”.

In 1915, sharing the ideas of the other futurist exponents, he joined the army together with Boccioni and Marinetti.

In 1916, after receiving a combat medal, Sant’Elia was commissioned to design the cemetery of the Arezzo Brigade, in Monfalcone. On October 10, while the cemetery was still under construction, he was killed in action.

The general theory of the ‘Ideal City’ is encapsulated in this sentence from the 1914 manifesto:

“We must invent and rebuild the futurist city similar to an immense tumultuous, agile, mobile, dynamic construction site in every part, and the futurist house similar to a gigantic machine”.

In France Le Corbusier conducted a parallel development with the concept of the ideal city in his ‘Cité Radieuse’ which postulated the demolition of the traditional urban layout of Paris and its replacement by vast areas of tower blocks and highways. We all know what this dystopic vision has led to in those cities where a degenerated version has created severe social problems. However, it’s odd that the drug-infested, knife-crimed UK tower blocks are now pointing to similarly-silhouetted exclusively-luxurious tower blocks; just witness the abhorrent developments along the south Thames waterfront at Battersea. Perhaps the fugacious ‘ideal city’ concept lives on still?

However, Sant’Elia deserves credit for having sensed the close dependence between architectural and urban problems on which the planning and reflection of all modern architectural movements has been set.