The emergence of architectural futurism Automatic translate

The turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was a time when steam turbines, transatlantic liners and electric trams changed cities in a matter of years. Against this backdrop, the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti announced the Futurist Manifesto in 1909, a programmatic text that affirmed the beauty of speed and machines.

Young architects took the manifesto’s ideas as an invitation to abandon historical quotations, Gothic turrets, and massive Corinthian cornices. Antonio Sant’Elia, who had studied at the Brianza Academy, spent two years sketching out hundreds of visionary plans for a “New City” — a vertical metropolis with multi-tiered roads, transport ramps, and monolithic towers of concrete and steel. Although Sant’Elia died in World War I, his plans spread across Europe and formed the early canon of the “mechanical city.”

At the same time, in Petrograd, Vladimir Tatlin proposed a spiral "Monument to the Third International", where steel ribs raised glass capsule volumes. The Russian project, like the Italian "Città Nuova", remained on paper, but together they set a common vector - the rejection of decor for the sake of expressiveness of construction and movement.

From manifestos to the first built objects

After the war, engineers learned to reinforce concrete, and steel mills learned to bend large-span I-beam trusses. This allowed futuristic plans to be transferred from the architect’s file to a real scale. The United States enjoyed the greatest success: in 1961, the Los Angeles Airport’s Theme Tower appeared – a ring-shaped “flying saucer” building supported by two intersecting parabolic arches. A year later, Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center terminal building opened in New York. Its concrete shell, reminiscent of outstretched wings, illustrated the idea of ​​technical optimism and rapid transit.

These projects consolidated specific techniques for futurism:

• continuous curved surfaces instead of straight facades;
• pipe-like spaces that conduct the flow of people without intersections;
• generalized plasticity, not decorative detailing.

Futurism outside Europe and the USA

Technological pathos quickly spread beyond the classical centers of modernism. In the new capital of Brazil, the architect-engineer Oscar Niemeyer erected a hyperboloid cathedral made up of sixteen curvilinear columns. The temple looks like an open palm reaching toward the sky, and combines the symbolism of the Catholic tradition with the geometry of the machine age.

In Japan, the experimental Metabolism group proposed mobile living capsules that could adapt to population growth; in France, Claude Parenti developed flexible “fluid cities.” Although not all of the concepts were realized, they expanded the geography of the movement and showed that futurism was not a monocentric style, but a global discussion about the shape of the environment of the future.

Neo-futurism and digital design

Personal computers and 3D modeling have brought back interest in continuous surfaces. The term “neo-futurism” was first used in the 1970s, but its real impact began to be seen after 2000, when algorithmic scripts and BIM environments made it possible to accurately calculate complex geometries.

Zaha Hadid gave the movement a recognizable look: her Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku forms a flowing wave between the square and the exhibition halls; the facade is covered with fiberglass panels, and the supporting truss consists of individually calculated pipes. For the Dongdaemun Design Plaza complex in Korea, Hadid produced 45,000 aluminum panels of a unique shape - digital fabrication replaced the traditional mass-produced module.

Santiago Calatrava, trained in both architecture and engineering, created the Mediopadana train station with a 300-metre-long “sinusoidal” steel shell. For the 2020 Dubai World Expo, he designed the UAE pavilion: 28 “wings” open hydraulically, creating shade canopies and simultaneously generating solar energy.

Design innovations and environmental context

Early futurists celebrated smoking factories; modern ones strive to reduce their carbon footprint. Saarinen’s thin-walled domes saved material; Niemeyer used passive cooling with a mirror pool around the cathedral; Hadid uses fiberglass, which is four times lighter than concrete, reducing the weight of the frame and the cost of the foundation.

Neo-futuristic buildings often integrate:

• sensors that regulate façade shading;
• collection of rainwater in shell-like coverings;
• adaptive natural ventilation systems calculated using CFD models.

The city as a "kinetic stage"

Futurism has always conceived of the city as changing rather than static. Today, this idea is supported by transport hubs that connect the railway, metro and Aeroexpress under a single shell covering. An example is the Oculus of the World Trade Center: 350 m long steel ribs form a single public space where daylight filters from above and passengers are distributed across twelve metro lines.

Such structures turn movement into an event, and the smooth form helps pedestrians navigate intuitively, without excessive signs.

Criticism and social aspects

The style has its opponents. The costs of individual formwork, complex hydraulic mechanisms and exoskeletons can exceed the budget of standard buildings. Journalists point out that some objects are threatened with premature obsolescence if the digital “shell” requires expensive repairs. Nevertheless, it is precisely in this search for forms that the value of the direction is hidden: it constantly tests the boundaries of the possible and involves engineers, programmers and ecologists in a single design process.

With the transition to a green economy, the key challenge will be to combine plastic freedom with strict energy balance requirements. Already today, 3D printing of composites allows for the production of load-bearing elements without excess material; biomimetic algorithms optimize the structure based on the principle of bone tissue, reducing weight and increasing rigidity.

Architectural futurism is not an ensemble of ready-made typologies, but a dynamic methodology, where each era offers its own answers to the question: “What form should the environment take to support new modes of movement, communication and knowledge production?”

At the beginning of the 20th century, the answer was concrete megalopolis towers, in the middle — white spaceports of airport terminals, today — hybrids of parametric shell and smart engineering systems. And each cycle leaves recognizable arches, wings and waves in the cities, reminding us: dreams of speed and freedom of forms continue to feed architecture.