HELLO FUTURAMA
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Feartown, Ideal Cities of Uncertain Futures....
The empty piazza and linear perspectives of Mussolini's 1938-42 project: E.U.R. or Esposizione Universale di Roma (Universal Exhibition Rome). A series of cold and perfectly ideal blocks of buildings which were certainly inspired by de Chirico's paintings of claustrophobic/surrealistic architectures.
One of the most iconic building of E.U.R. was the Colosseo Quadrato or Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (Palace of the Italian Civilisation), build by fascist architect Marcello Piacentini, the 216 arks facade was supposed to remind Romans of the perfection of their past and future and praise the fascist ideal of the Duce. A rational approach to idealism.
Ideal cities always puzzle me. I feel like looking at kids playing with lego bricks. The human is totally absent as if no one really cared in the end about who was going to inhabit those spaces. You can find an echo of this in two fantastic French movies: Playtime by Jacques Tati (the modern version of the futurist city) and Paul Grimault's Le Roi et l'Oiseau (the surrealist intemporal and poetic version of trapping cities). And if you read French do get your hands on Les Cités Obscures, a series of comic books by Francois Schuitten and Benoit Peeters, super inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
Don't you just love it when designers make you realize that almost everything is a reference to something?
In the same vein altough more weirdly linked is the Babylonian and utopic vision of a future where cities would mix influences and pose for an universal vision of the megapolis. The need to compete with the general subconscious of perfect cities as a way to re-embrace the classical past and its grandiloquent architecturhomage to Gods. Perfect cities, Ideal Futuropolis would flirt with Retro-Futurism and Goggie architecture while the Nagasaki and Hiroshima chocs would make way to a darker vision of the city of tomorrow. Vladimir Tatlin and his Monument to the Third International, later Albert Speer and his vision of a perfect Nazi Berlin, Ozamu Tetzuka and his retro futurist version of Metropolis and finally Richard Buckminster Fuller's post futuristic geodesic ensemble, all of those are ricochets bouncing on the surface of our dream of the perfetta città.
Perfection and Perversion of tomorrow...
"For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the 'more with less' technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option of becoming enduringly successful."
—Buckminster Fuller, 1980.
infos/
Mario Chiattone (1891-1957)
Antonio Sant'Elia (1888-1916)
Le Roi et l'Oiseau (1979)
Tetzuka's Metropolis (1949)
Rintaro's Metropolis (2002)
Lang's Metropolis (1928)
Playtime (1967)
Montparnasse Station (1914)
Les Cités Obscures (1992)
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)