Metropoli. Visionary architecture from Futurism to Rationalism

Fondazione Cirulli is glad to present the exhibition Metropoli. Visionary architecture from Futurism to Rationalism, at Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, from October 27, 2024 to February 7, 2025.

Central to Futurist imagery and activism alike was the modern metropolis. The city emerged as a site of political agitation and intervention by Futurist artists and authors. Yet it also became a fantastic ideal to be made concrete: a realm to be represented in in “multicolored, polyphonic” expressions, but also transformed by visionary imagination. This extended from Futurist painting, drawing, and music, to architectural renderings and designs.

 The city of New York served as an early inspiration for avant-garde Italian conceptions of the modern metropolis, as evidenced by the painting with which the show will open: Athos Casarini’s New York (1912). Even a painter like Osvaldo Licini, though never an official member of the Futurist movement, was influenced in his formal reorderings of urban space by Futurist pictorial strategies. The studies of visual “disintegration” and “interpenetration” carried out by the prominent Futurist artist Giacomo Balla bear particularly upon the development of modern urban space in Italy.

Carlo Carrà’s evocation of Milan’s new train station serves as a bridge to the exhibition’s next room, which will examine the urban imagery of Antonio Sant’Elia – the movement’s official architect – and Virgilio Marchi, a younger successor who took up the mantle of Futurist visionary architecture. The exhibition will continue by looking at Futurism’s bearing upon and echoes in rationalist trends in interwar Italy, including RAM’s (Ruggero Alfredo Michahelles) spare pavilion designs and Mario Ridolfi’s Rationalist Architecture from the same period.

The exhibition also considers the contentious place of the rationalist imagination under the Fascist regime, along with some notable examples of another modernist tendency which aimed to represent the regime: Aeropittura (Aeropainting), represented here in works by Bruno Munari and Alfredo Ambrosi. Polemics over architectural modernity under Fascism are evoked by projects for the EUR, and the exhibition concludes with post-war examples of visionary architecture in a Futurist vein.