Collection Sant'Elia

Sant'Elia: Futurist vertigo

The nucleus of drawings by the futurist
architect Antonio Sant’Elia (Como, 1888 - Monfalcone, GO, 1916) is an important
collection at the Civic Museums of Como.

Author of the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (1914), Sant'Elia brought to his projects a great enthusiasm for technological innovations and the vitalistic activism of the modern city so well exemplified in Umberto Boccioni’s painting La città che sale (The rising city).

La Torre Faro

The example of Viennese Secessionist architecture, his source of inspiration, is still present in the design of the Torre Faro, which now displays modernity in its structural components.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti used the drawing as a model for the design of the Monumento ai Caduti di Como (War Memorial in Como), installed on the lakeside in 1933 by Giuseppe Terragni and based on a reworking of a Sant’Elia drawing by the Futurist painter Enrico Prampolini.

The Città Nuova project

The series of the Città Nuova, to which the drawing of 1914 belongs, express the culmination of the idea of a visionary city made up of bridges, footbridges, flyovers, train tracks passing under and through dizzyingly high buildings, and cars speeding along motorways.

This is an architectural-urban vision because in these drawings Sant'Elia imagines ways of solving the problems of traffic flow and movement around in the city by integrating the movement of people and all the routes with the buildings themselves. In this way he sought to resolve the structural and architectural problem according to the function that the building performs within the urban fabric itself.

Inspired by the brand new power stations in Valtellina, with their elongated forms soaring between the rocky ridges of the mountains, and by the gigantism of architectural proportions taught by Otto Wagner and the Wagnerschule, Sant'Elia's creative imagination led him to produce a series of drawings that are quite unique in the world of art and architecture.