A pleasure palace that was never built fed straight into the Centre Pompidou
Neo-futurism grew from mid-century structural experiments by Alvar Aalto and Buckminster Fuller into a movement blending art, technology and design. Cedric Price's Fun Palace of 1961 never left the drawing board, yet its ideas travelled straight into the Centre Pompidou designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano.
The original Futurists were Italians of the early 20th century who prized speed, risk and heroism. Their later namesake is broader. It was given its label in the 1980s but traces back to the 1950s, and it partly evolved out of high-tech architecture, sharing that style's fascination with industrial materials. Antonio Sant'Elia, a Futurist architect, is cited as one inspiration; figures such as William Pereira, Charles Luckman and Henning Larsen pushed the approach forward between the early 1960s and late 1970s, alongside the London group Archigram and the designer Eero Saarinen.
Critics have struggled to pin it down. Jean-Louis Cohen saw it as a side effect of technology, arguing that many modern buildings are products of new materials and new ideas about what giant structures should do. Etan J. Ilfeld stressed that the computer stops being a mere tool and becomes part of the creative act. Reyner Banham, discussing Archigram's Plug-in Computerized City, insisted that form need not trail function into oblivion.
Two manifestos gave the movement a second wind. In 2007 the innovation designer Vito Di Bari, once an executive director at UNESCO, wrote a Neo-Futuristic City Manifesto as part of Milan's bid for the Universal Expo 2015, calling for art, advanced technology and ethics to raise quality of life. On 20 February 2008 a British group, The Neo-Futurist Collective, launched a rival text by Rowena Easton on the streets of Brighton, timed to the 99th anniversary of Marinetti's 1909 Futurist manifesto. Theirs was more political, pitting technological optimism against despair over climate change and finance.
In the 21st century the style's energy is often credited to Zaha Hadid, a Pritzker Architecture Prize winner, and to Santiago Calatrava. Its roster now reaches beyond buildings to designers like Patrick Jouin and the artist Simon Stålenhag, while architects including Norman Foster and Kenzo Tange represent the technology-first strand it absorbed.
Source: Neo-futurism
