The Work of the Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia is perhaps the clearest example of architecture being pushed into machine-hood at the beginning of the 20th century, albeit with a strange and often overlooked twist.
 
In his Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, Sant’Elia rails against neoclassical ornament as "supreme imbecility“. In point 4 of his Manifesto, he states that "Decoration as an element superimposed on architecture is absurd, and that the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials.“ This point has become virtually lost in architectural history, due to the ubiquity of Sant’Elia’s black-and-white renders of power stations, ports, and hotels in print.
 
His work, seen in its true intended colors, takes on an entirely new life, one of rich, rusty affect incongruent with the extreme monochromatics of his time. The vivid color gradients expose a supressed trajectory of Modernism, one which simultaneously eschews decoration but desires emotional relief from the machine aesthetic it is promoting. Thanks to Todd Gannon.