Antonio Santelia

Born Apr. 30, 1888, in Como; died Oct. 10, 1916, in a battle near Monfalcone. Italian architect.

Sant’Elia graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Bologna in 1912. He was influenced by O. Wagner and the modern architecture of the United States. In 1914 he designed fantastic plans for a “new city,” which he envisioned as a gigantic agglomeration of multistory terraced buildings made of steel and concrete, with projecting elevator towers, multilevel streets and pedestrian passageways, and escalators. His forceful rejection of the old and assertion of the value of technology and the dynamics of movement brought Sant’Elia close to futurism, which he discussed in his article “The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture” (1914). Sant’Elia’s plans have had a noticeable influence on several 20th-century approaches to urban planning.