Tabula Rasa

2by4 by About Space

Jugoslovenski paviljon, Paris Expo 1937

My senior project in Architecture School owed a lot to this architect. For a brief while I became obsessed with the ideas and aesthetics that he taught. Antonio Sant’Elia was an Italian architect, that left no built legacy but was a key member of the Futurist movement in architecture. The manifesto Futurist Architecture was published in August 1914:

"COMBAT AND DESPISE:

All the pseudo-architecture of the avant-garde, Austrian, Hungarian, German and American;

All classical architecture, solemn, hieratic, scenographic, decorative, monumental, pretty and pleasing;

The embalming, reconstruction and reproduction of ancient monuments and palaces;

Perpendicular and horizontal lines, cubical and pyramidical forms that are static, solemn, aggressive and absolutely excluded from our utterly new sensibility;

The use of massive, voluminous, durable, antiquated and costly materials.

AND PROCLAIM:

A Grammar for a City

Office KGDVS + DOGMA

"This city, designed for 500,000 residents, is organised as a sequence of rooms that are formed by ‘city walls’. The city walls are a composition of cruciform buildings that represent two-thirds of the built mass of the city. These ‘walls’ form the habitable architectonic structure of the city. The spaces between the city walls are rooms without content, providing the space for further urban development. The future content is the furniture of the rooms, as it were. The plan seeks to define the form of the city in a rigid manner, without lapsing into the naïve modernistic ideal of the city as a fixed, predetermined organisation of buildings. The city walls and city rooms form the ‘genesis’ of the city, its bare facts. In this manner they fulfil the only role that can be ascribed to architecture: providing a specific inertia against the instability of life itself.