“For those who, like ourselves, are convinced that
architecture is one of
the few ways to realize cosmic order on earth, to put things
to order and
above all to affirm humanity’s capacity for acting according
to reason,
it is a “moderate utopia” to imagine a near future in which
all architecture will be created with a single act, from a single design
capable of
clarifying once and for all the motives which have induced
man to build
dolmens, menhirs, pyramids, and lastly (ultima ratio) a
white line in the
desert.”
Superstudio, The
Continuous Monument: An Architectural
Model for Total Urbanization, 1969.
Founded in
Florence by a group of radical young architects in 1966, SUPERSTUDIO was at the
heart of the architectural and design avant garde until its dissolution in the
late 1970s. Through photo-collages, films and exhibitions, it critiqued the
modernist doctrines that had dominated 20th century design thinking.
"In the
beginning we designed objects for production, designs to be turned into wood
and steel, glass and brick or plastic - then we produced neutral and usable
designs, then finally negative utopias, forewarning images of the horrors which
architecture was laying in store for us with its scientific methods for the perpetuation
of existing models." This was how Superstudio described its work in a
catalogue the group produced to accompany the 1973 exhibition Fragments From A
Personal Museum at the Neue Galerie in Graz, Austria.
Superstudio
was then at the fulcrum of avant garde thinking in architecture and design.
Ever since it first surfaced in 1966 at the Superarchitecture exhibition in the
Italian town of Pistoia, Superstudio had been among the most vociferous of the
radical design groups which were challenging the modernist orthodoxies that had
dominated architectural thinking for decades.
By
questioning architecture's ability to change the world for the better and the
boundless faith in technology expressed by earlier, more optimistic groups such
as Archigram in the UK, Superstudio raised issues which have preoccupied
successive generations of architects and designers from Studio Alchymia in late
1970s Italy and to the Memphis collective in the mid-1980s, to contemporary
figures like Rem Koolhaas and Foreign Office Architects.
Superstudio
was founded in 1966 by two radicals – Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di
Francia - who had met while studying architecture at the University of
Florence. Later they were joined by Alessandro and Roberto Magris and Piero
Frassinelli. The group's relationship with Florence, where the five founders
continued to live after graduation, was critical to its work. "It is the
designer who must attempt to re-evaluate his role in the nightmare he helped to
conceive, to retread the historical process which inverted the hopes of the
modern movement," pronounced Toraldo di Francia. "And in Italy,
Florence, a town where all such contradictions become most evident (the moment
one draws the curtains of mythically misrepresented past) stands historically
symbolic."
Yet the
central theme of Superstudio's agenda over the next 12 years would be its
disillusionment with the modernist ideals that had dominated architectural and
design thinking since the early 1900s. Once fresh and dynamic, by the late 1960s,
modernism had hit intellectual stasis. Rather than blithely regarding
architecture as a benevolent force, the members of Superstudio blamed it for
having aggravated the world's social and environmental problems. Equally
pessimistic about politics, the group developed visionary scenarios in the form
of photo-montages, sketches, collages and storyboards of a new 'Anti-Design'
culture in which everyone is given a sparse, but functional space to live in
free from superfluous objects.
Superstudio
was not alone in its concerns. The collective emerged in 1966 at the moment
when the technocratic optimism of the first half of the 1960s was souring. The
watershed was the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966 when
Mao Tse-tung gave Western intellectuals a new cause to believe in after a
decade of disillusion since their faith in communism was shattered by
Khrushchev’s exposure of Stalin's brutalities. Events in China made Western
society seem spiritually barren at a time of growing concern about the Vietnam
War. In the visual arts, radicals rebelled against the extrovert imagery of Pop
Art in favour of the politically engaged work of Fluxus artists like Joseph
Beuys and Nam June Paik. The rising tide of political frustration culminated in
the 1968 student riots in Paris and copycat protests in London, Tokyo and
Prague. Women formed fledgeling feminist movements such as the Women's
Liberation Front in the US and Mouvement de Libération des Femmes in France.
Decades of oppression against gay men and women erupted in a pitched battle in
New York, when the police tried to close the Stonewall, a gay bar in the West
Village and a politicised gay rights movement exploded.
Superstudio's
response was to develop its 'Anti-Design' projects: themes from which were
echoed in the work of other radical architects and designers, notably the
members of Archizoom, a fellow Florentine group consisting of Andrea Branzi,
Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, Dario and Lucia Bartolini and Massimo
Morozzi. Both groups were founded in 1966 and their first important project was
to express their theories about the crisis of modernism in the
Superarchitecture exhibition in Pistoia, Italy. A year later, they refined the
ideas aired in Superarchitecture in a joint follow-up show in Modena.
During this
period, Superstudio still clung to the conventional wisdom that architecture
could be a powerful – and positive – force for progress. By 1968, the group had
dismissed this notion as improbably optimistic. The following year Superstudio
unveiled The Continuous Monument project in which the apparently endless
framework of a black-on-white grid - which was to become the group's best known
motif - extends across the earth’s surface in a critique of what Superstudio
saw as the absurdities of contemporary urban planning. The group created
photo-collages to show the grid cloaking the Rocky Coast, Coketown and
Manhattan.
In 1970,
Superstudio then revived the grid – its "neutral surface" – in a
collection of furniture manufactured by the Italian company Zanotta. Designed
in stark, geometric forms and covered in the ABET plastic laminate
traditionally associated with cheap cafés and 1950s coffee bars, its Quaderna
tables, benches and seats were a wry, but functional commentary on political
disillusionment.
During the
early 1970s, Superstudio made a series of films intending to raise awareness of
the potentially negative environmental impact of architecture at a time when
such issues were seldom explored. In 1972 the group was offered an opportunity
to articulate its theories to a broader public by participating in Italy: The
New Domestic Landscape, an exhibition of contemporary Italian design at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. The radical work of Superstudio and Archizoom
was shown alongside that of their more conventional compatriots such as Marco
Zanuso and Richard Sapper.
During the
same year, Superstudio set its sights on the heritage movement by developing a
surreal proposal to flood Florence by blocking the Arno thereby submerging the
city centre under water except for the dome of the cathedral in a parody of the
conservative Save the Historic Centres campaign.
The group
was given another prestigious international forum in 1973 when its work was
surveyed in a retrospective exhibition – Fragments From A Personal Museum – at
the Neue Galerie in Graz. By then, most of the members of Superstudio were
teaching at the University of Florence, where they had met as students. The
group remained active – albeit less energetically so – throughout the mid-1970s,
only to fold in 1978 when the five founders concurred that they had lost
momentum as a collaborative force and that they might be more effective by
working independently.
Superstudio's
thinking has proved more enduring than the group itself. Quaderna tables are
still in production at Zanotta and Superstudio's collages and drawings have
been acquired for the permanent collections of Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris
and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Moreover the group's once radical
theories about architecture's environmental impact, the potentially negative
consequences of technology and the inability of politics to untangle complex
social problems are now considered to be core concerns by self-aware
contemporary architects and designers.
Quaderna tables
*Superstudio Pratt Manhattan Gallery/Artist Space/Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York Felicity Scott
*designmuseum.org
Cristiano Toraldo di Francia was born in Florence in 1941.
After attending the High School he enrolled at the University where he
graduated in Architecture.In December 1966 he founded the Superstudio with his
colleague, Adolfo Natalini and participated in the first exhibition of
Superarchitecture, which was published by Domus Architectural Design and was
repeated in April 2007 in Milan at Galleria Carla Sozzoni. His research work and
re-establishment of the language of architecture has been documented by
numerous international publications and has been presented in major museums and
art exhibitions. In 1972 Superstudio is invited to the exhibition "Italy:
The New Domestic Landscape" at the MOMA in New York. After this experiences, in 1980 he continued
his career on his own. Toraldo di Francia has always worked in different fields
of design, from industrial design to architecture. He designed among others for
Anonima Castelli, Zanotta, Poltronova, Flos, Calzolari, Giovannetti, Breda, the
palace, Pica; for industry we can mention series of table "Quaderna"
for Zanotta, the Integrated System for Anonima Castelli wall, the body and
interior for the train "Circumvesuviana" train to Breda, then the
modular seating "Franny" for Fasem, the sessions "Circus"
for Calzolari The ventilated wall tiles "Earth" to the palace, the
Dolfi ceramics, silverware for Pampaloni, system installations for pharmacies
to Ataena. He participated in national and international design competitions.In
1974 he was invited by the Faculty of Architecture Australia to take part in
the National Congress of itinerant students, during which he lectures in
several cities. Since 1974 he teaches and lectures at various universities in
Europe, Japan and the United States (Paris La Villette, Architectural
Association, Nihon University, the Berlage Institute , Rietveld Academy,
Cornell University, Syracuse University, Rhode Island School of Design, Kent State
University, San Luis Obispo Polytechnic,Polytechnic Pomona, California State
University). In 1992 he was invited to take part in the founding of the first
Faculty of Architecture of the Marches for the University of Camerino, Ascoli
Piceno in the seat, for which he is currently Associate Professor of
Architectural Design.
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