Text c Futurism

Futurism was founded in 1903 by the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944). As its name suggests, the movement dissociated itself from the past by embracing technological progress. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909 celebrated the inherent potential and dynamism of the machine and systems of communication. As the first cultural movement to distance, itself from nature and to glorify the metropolis, Futurism was extremely influential to subsequent design movements. The energetic flux modern city life was captured in the artistic works of Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Gino Severini (1883-1966), Carlo Carra (1881-1966) and Giacomo Balla. Through the use of fragmented Cubist-tike geometric elements that evoked the feeling of speed and acceleration. Within graphic design, Futurism was asserted through the use of typography that was laid out expressively rather than conventionally. This idea of expressive structure was also used in the composition of poetry. In 1910, the Manifesto of Futurist Painting was signed by Carra, Balla, Boccioni, Severini and Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), and later Balla became the first experiment with the practice application of Futurist theory to the Decorative arts. These expressive forays into design followed up by artist and designer, Fortunato Depero (1892-1960), who set up a craft workshop for Futurist art in Rovereto, which operated throughout the 1920s. Depero wrote the Complessitta plastica gioco libero futurista – L’essere vivente-artificale (Plastic complexity – free futuristic play – the artifical-living being) in 1914 and at his House of Art in Rovereto he devised a neo-plastic language of design that was later promoted by the Italian Rationalists. The architect Antonio Snt' Elia (1888-1616) joined the movement in 1914 and exhibited his proposals for «The New City» in Milan. The sweeping dynamic forms of his architecture were left unornamented and, with their raw unfinished surfaces and violent colouring verged on Brutalism. Although Sant'Elia died in 1916, his Manifesto Futurist Architecture remained influential, especially to members of De Stile who received it in 1917. Futurism attempted to subvert bourgeois culture and was in some ways a destructive force in that it necessarily expressed the aggressive aesthetic of urban life in the machine-age. Aligned to Fascism, the Futurists sought order Through radicalism and in so doing can be seen as the first truly radical design movement.

Text d Form and decor

The territory of Art Deco is defined by boundaries set on the right, by Neoclassicism and, on the left, by rationalism. In spite of the antithetical nature of these two tendencies, both are distinguished by a high degree of internalorganization, staticity, resolute objectivism, internationalism, and a certain plastic uniformity. Opposites of this kind were almost bound to provoke attempts to engineer a convergence between them. Art Deco combined details borrowed from Classicism -pilasters, caissons, corbels, cornices, ornamentation, sculpture, and painting - with the spatial liberation characteristic of Functionalism. The cynical nakedness of functional architecture and the haughty austerity of classical architecture gave way to shockingly unfettered and rich form.

The convergence of Classicism and rationalism, the traditional and the contemporary, was something theoreticians of Soviet architecture had long dreamed about. Now Art Deco had made it a reality that could be realized in practice. It was this chimerical coupling that was both the key to Art Deco's success with the authorities and the general public and the cause of the active hostility it encountered among many professional architects.

Quite unconsciously, those working in Art Deco had if not destroyed, then called into question, the main dogmas of Classicism and the principal postulates of Functionalism. The latter dogmas were the basis of architectural training and the foundation of the professional architect's consciousness; when Art Deco showed that they could be ignored, this fuelled the professional community's suspicion that Art Deco was not to be trusted.

Art Deco made a rule out of breaking traditional rules. This lack of rules and dogmas makes Art Deco difficult to teach, which explains why there has never been a school associated with the style. Art Deco has never had dedicated or consistent followers, passionate exponents, or its own theoreticians. It has, however, had more than its fair share of productive practitioners. Art Deco came into being not thanks to the efforts of a company of enthusiasts, but as a movement born from the bowels of life itself, from man's natural desire to embellish and decorate. It exploits that which was looked down upon by Classicists as lowly or imperfect and by Functionalists as unprofessional, primitive, or even criminal. Art Deco is insidious: a slight, barely noticeable violation of balance produces something which is artificial, preposterous, overbearing. The name "Art Deco" - which seems so playful and casual - turns out to be extremely exact, a precise description of the most important features of the style. The first such feature is Art Deco's essential artistic quality, its artiness. This explains the heterogeneity of everything that it produces, its combination of wonderful discoveries and insights with banalities and disappointing lapses.

Art Deco stresses artistic priorities; Classicism and rationalism, on the other hand, avoid expressions of subjectivity and conceal their nature as art behind appeals to tradition, function, or technique. Thus Art Deco is dependent on the personality of the author. The architect's personality is the critical factor, the guarantee of quality, but also that which underwrites the inevitable main crop of weak or scarcely noticeable works.