A shiny and hard future: Superstudio

On top of the world... Il Monumento Continuo, a gridded structure that the Superstudio architects suggested would eventually cover the planet.

"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."