An Interpretation of Superstudio
Jack Gell
Abstract This essay is an interpretation of Superstudio’s work in chronological order. After explaining their beginnings, I make comparisons between their striking radical ethos and that of modernism and postmodernism, acknowledging their rebellious attitude towards society. After situating Superstudio in their 60’s context, I then move onto their first great work The Continuous Monument. This was published along with a storyboard describing in detail their abstract ethos and revealing much of their inspiration. It is this piece that I will focus on in order to explain their radical interpretation of humanity that categorises their work. I also discuss Superstudio’s desire for architecture to become an extensive ‘single plan’ that houses and provides for all; relating this to God (the intelligent designer), and how humanity without this God is not on path to fulfill Superstudio’s vision. I then ask how we might solve this issue by the means of their previously demonstrated intelligent designer, and discuss the Internet as a solution to create the ‘single plan’. Their next great work, the Twelve Ideal Cities, reveals alternative worlds to bring forth an awareness of our hopeless evolutionary path. I then delve deeper into Superstudios desire for monuments, and our current lack of faith, which leads me to their final work, The Fundamental Acts, their purest of evolutionary strategies, which I describe and then interpret as an embodiment of the Internet. I conclude by suggesting that Superstudio’s underlying message is that of humanity united, allowing us to tap into primitive instincts and rediscover what it means to be human.
A. Margis, C. Toraldo di Francia, P. Frassinelli, R. Magris, A. Natalini
Introduction Superstudio were a collective of young architects from the 60s who explored alternative worlds as parallels to our own in order to reveal current issues in humanity. Specifically they were concerned by technology that people so enthusiastically embraced, and through their explorations tackled the positives and negatives of such technologies. But as we have progressed forty years later, such changes as the Internet now reflect some of their futuristic visions. In this essay I will discuss their major works and bring light to their relevance to our time.
The Beginning In 1966, Superarchitecture, an exhibition in the Italian town of Pistoia, displayed designs at the forefront of avantgarde thinking. The exhibition consisted of the work of Superstudio alongside Archizoom, a collective of thinkers, that had only recently graduated from The Faculty of Architecture of Florence University. These two collectives were situated on the crest of a wave in architecture and design challenging the modernist orthodoxies that had played such a powerful role throughout the lives of these young radicals.
The uprising of Superstudio, from the capital of a medieval Europe, was first mistaken as only an attempt to 1 revive the megastructure . However, Superstudio’s artistic strategies were closely tied to that of the historical avantgarde, particularly the works of dada and surrealism, demonstrating a rebellious attitude towards society echoing that of these earlier movements. Superstudio has since been classed as an exponent of the 2 Italian ‘architectural radicale’, a phrase that never really had a formal basis at the time. The term ‘radicale’ in this title doesn’t just link their artistic mindset to that of the artistic avantgarde, but also the coming of their discipline, through the past few decades of modernism:
‘It is the designer who must attempt to reevaluate his role in the nightmare he helped to conceive, 3 to retread the historical process which inverted the hopes of the modern movement,’ Despite calling the state of architecture in the mid 20th century a “nightmare”, Toraldo di Francia respected the modernist aesthetic. It was the morals, not the aesthetic of the movement that he found distressing and responded by accelerating them still further to their logical, dystopian conclusion. It was also the neo futuristic, antiheroic and pro consumerist Archigram, demonstrating their ever optimistic union with technology that led to Superstudio to question this boundless faith in automation, machinery and computers, that was being adopted by groups similar to themselves. This agitation is well described by Peter Cook, who was only made aware of the goings on in Florence a couple of years earlier, when Archigrams first publication sold out instantly in the Universities book shop. 1
William W. Braham, Rethinking Technology: A reader in architectural theory: 1968 Superstudio (London: Routledge, 2007) pp. 174183 (p.175) 2 Marie Theres Stauffer, ‘Utopian Reflections, Reflected Utopias: Urban Design by Archizoom and Superstudio’, AA files, 47 (2002), 2436 (p. 25) 3 Design Museum Touring Exhibition, ‘Superstudio’, London Design Museum, (2003) < http://design.designmuseum.org/design/superstudio > [accessed 20 March 2015]
Reflecting on the 60’s many years later, Peter Cook was describing the works of the era’s current musicians, artists and the reality of the Space Race:
‘If these things be happening simultaneously in painting, music, engineering and the rest, if Buckminster Fuller lived, then what were we doing with neatly dimensioned metal windows? Such a reaction, and the energy of the corporate audacity enabled even the shyest (Toraldo di Francia of 4 Superstudio) to come out of the Expressionistic closet.’
Like many young left wing militants were with the older generations, Superstudio was frustrated. Modernism displayed such trivial attention to detail, during an era that was so youthful and exciting. It was a time when great architectural thinkers such as Robert Venturi, became sick of the monotonous world architects were 5 creating, and insisted instead on landscapes resembling Disney World , where one is amidst a playground of aesthetics. However, despite their frustrations with modernism, Superstudio didn’t simply follow in the wake of the postmodern turn . They dismissed these postmodern desires to achieve that specific sense of place or circumstance, and instead argued that a world free from the ‘desire’, the desire that was so important to postmodernists, a world that desired nothing, would be the true sign that architecture had solved all of humanities issues. Superstudio still had faith in the convention that architecture was able to be 6 the all encompassing positive and powerful force for progress through ‘AntiDesign’ , a term used to describe design driven by the certainties of science and proportion. In contrast to Toraldo’s humble ways, Adolfo Natalini, another member of this five man collective, started out 7 as a Popart painter , an extrovert. He was the type that Superstudio would soon rebel against in favour of 8 more politically engaged artists. In an interview in 1983, he describes the complex relationship Superstudio had to the notion of utopias/dystopias, describing them as ‘negative utopias demonstratio per absurdum’, a ‘demonstration by the absurd’. The conclusion being that Superstudio were a means of foresight, envisaging futures that are formed due to specific human tendencies, and therefore creating both of the above, positive and negative explorations of our future
Il Monumento Continuo Despite the Superarchitecture show bringing Superstudio into the public eye, little was recorded of this historic exhibition . All that can be seen are grainy black and white photographs showing bold and curvaceous 60’s installations, an aesthetic very different from what they would soon preach. It was two years later that Superstudio released their next work, that laid the foundations for things to come.
T he Continuous Monument, released in 1969, encompasses Superstudio’s best known motifs echoed in all their future actions. With this work came a storyboard describing Superstudio’s principals as if developed from the beginning of time. This architectural adaptation of The Book of Genesis initially appears vague and capricious but, on further reflection, it demonstrates some of this collectives key influences as well as their methods. Furthermore, this storyboard is provocative in its attempt to portray architecture as the all
Peter Cook, ‘Natalini Superstudio’, The Architectural Review, 171 (1971), 4851 (p. 48) Nigel Coates, Narrative architecture: Superstudio (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), pp. 4043 (p. 41) 6 Design Museum Touring Exhibition. 7 Cook, p. 49 8 Design Museum Touring Exhibition. 4 5
encompassing force for which humanity will be saved. This almost spiritual rendering of the architectural profession bares comparison to Le Corbusier’s belief in architecture as a religion during the design of La Tourette, or Kahn’s infinite respect for the masonry module, as if overwhelmed by such a spiritual sensation as that described in this parable:
Objects, Monuments, Cities
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The storyboard begins with the work of Kepler, a scientist who came to realize that regular polygons may be the geometrical basis of the Universe. This is followed by the derived geometry of the human body from Vitruvius, the golden section, the Mandala (a buddhist and hindu representation of the universe as a square Peter Lang, William Menking, Superstudio: Life Without Objects (Milan: Skira Editore S.p.A, 2003), pp. 124130
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containing a circle), the proportions of a female head, and of course Le Corbusier’s modular. These intended to show us a regularity in proportions, depicting the square as a form from which all earthly dimensions are derived. Superstudio also unites us, the Vitruvian man, with our solar system and beyond, by specifically referring to to work of Kepler.
‘7. Man is not the centre of things, he is merely one of the vertices of the infinite polygon that unites the cosmos, the world, reason’
This text elegantly describes Kepler's theories in a new light, relating us and our primitive abilities to create form, with that of all that exists in this world. These notions of order and celestial geometry play crucial roles in the formation of the monuments that are discussed next, including Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza. Superstudio also make comparisons between the Kaaba (“The Cube”), Mecca and NASA’s Vehicle assembly building. According to Superstudio, each of these objects demonstrate the most primitive of human form, they: ‘fill in the fracture between rationality and the unconscious’, signifying the relationship 10 between all we don't yet know, and that of the square, the cube.
We are then told that when a monument does not form a solid, a linear structure takes shape instead; the Great Wall of China, aqueducts and motorways, but also major technical structures, even those that are ‘on a scale with the new dimension’. All these are ‘monmenti continui’ that ‘lay full length to embrace the earth’, rightfully connecting it with its primitive geometry.
It is now that we are taken on a journey describing the formalization of a generative architecture, which is to house the entire world.
An apocalypse of sorts has occurred, and all that we have known now must be forgotten. The earth is like that of the second day of Genesis : ‘without form and void’, All that was architecture now appears to us as a desert as for some reason we can no longer inhabit the buildings that existed before this apocalypse. Within this desert, the hands of a Godly figure form basic geometry, that acts as the first character in this parable of architecture. The form that appears is a cube, like the Kaaba, a gateway to a world of peace and harmony, but also representing:
Braham, p.176
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‘21… the first and the last act in the history of architectural ideas, as the intersection of the relationships between technology/sacredness/utilitarianism, between man machine rational structure and history’
This cube is the embodiment of architecture, and on splitting the cube equally and dispersing the smaller and yet smaller parts across our earth, each carries the genetic message of its race and so ‘order does not create disorder’. All that is built now originates from the same monolithic body.
We are then shown how this new architecture is formed, how each architectural element, the door, the corridor, the stone or the ceiling, and the walls, comes to be in this landscape ‘without form and void’. These element float towards one another, under the hand of some God, seemingly united by one primordial force. Here I am reminded of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (a screenshot of the film is used in one of their later collages), an object of similar proportions routed curiously to the arid landscape. These elements come together forming a single linear structure stretching its way around ‘the progressive impoverishment of the earth’, occupying ‘the optimal living zones, leaving the others free’. A linear form is made, that models
total urbanization, from a logical extrapolation of all previous monuments. This monument is now facing nature somewhat antagonistically, it is seen carving through deserts, occupying valleys and grasping cliff faces, yet appearing to connect beneath the earth's surface through its rational operations.
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‘On one side architecture stops being natural, and on the other nature stops being cultural’
After seeing iconic buildings frozen in time, preserved by the structure, from the Caryatid Porch and the Taj Mahal, to large motorway junctions, the storyboard ends its parable in Manhattan, a city arranged by the Continuous Monument into a grid of ice, clouds or sky;
‘A bunch of ancient skyscrapers, preserved in memory of a time when cities were built with no single plan...’
Design Museum Touring Exhabition
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A time with no single plan We do currently live in a time of ‘no single plan’, and are very far from reaching a purity in design as that described above, we instead progress with little foresight, and therefore must ask: does our trigger happy attitude towards technology improve things? It seems we have gotten used to the idea that evolution is able to produce the most efficient and elegant of animals, enough that many of us still believe they are designed. We forget that sometimes there are imperfections, imperfections you would expect only from accidents in history if there were no designer. A great example of this is that of the recurrent laryngeal, a nerve that runs a short distance from the brain to the larynx. But as we evolved from fish this nerve became looped around one of the main arteries to the heart, passing through the neck twice, and in the case of a giraffe, one is left with an obviously ridiculous detour, a mistake that no engineer would ever make, one of the great evolutionary enigmas disproving that of the intelligent designer. Not that the giraffe would ever be aware of this, whilst nibbling the young leaves from the tops of trees. We are still just evolving, almost like any other animal on this planet. As a new idea arrives, we see if it generally improves our quality of life, and if so, we keep it. This has externalized our own evolution to objects and our surroundings, thus moving step by step, or branch by branch as we choose to pursue one technology over the other. But this process is not necessarily positive.
This echoes within so much of the world we have created for ourselves, even the keyboard I am typing on was developed such that keys would not strike one another on an typewriter, and now we are left with a default that holds us back. And perhaps the car, a seemingly absurd concept if we are to consider it being proposed today; a metal box storing flammable liquid, able to reach excessive speeds, with the ability to kill oneself and others with just a twitch of one's wrists. Yet the industry will still grow, despite us all being aware of safer, more economical technologies to pursue. But not that we would notice, whilst motoring happily down country lanes.
The point I am making here is that we are still evolving, not as gradually as we once were, but none the less we are still evolving, and evolution can't go back to the drawing board, as evolution has no foresight. So how could this continuity in thought come about? Superstudio never delves deeper into describing the nature of this God like figure that fabricates its building through hovering elements; other than its description in the parable to the Continuous monument. How in modern day society does one unite all our objectives such that we can create this powerful new monument to our own existence.
I can not help but now consider the potential of the Internet, and its ability to create artificial intelligence to meet Superstudio’s desire for the all encompassing designer.
As time goes by, I believe we will become progressively more open on the Internet, not only for our trust in its infrastructure, but also as the more information we share, the better it becomes. On trusting this, one will remain completely connected with all aspects of it, and therefore consider it a fair exchange. With this occurring over a field of billions of people, we will develop a system where one entity is able to read the
behaviours of all that use it; it is possible that we can condense the behavior of all its users into one individual, an individual that is able to think on the premise of its billions of people, similar to the concept of an A.I. Perhaps this entity, that speaks as a union of the whole of humanity, is the God that Superstudio proposes.
Does this new single representative of the human race supersed e that of our natural evolu tion? Maybe it will be then, that we will no longer flow from one evolutionary branch to another, as nature intended. But instead be able to see the tree as a whole, as this Intelligent designer, who is maybe more of a messiah, born through an analysis of all human behavior, and able to find a clear route through our unknown purpose in life. The designer will achieve this as he, she or it can see us as one whole, concentrating all meaning relating to humanity into a simple clean solution.
Twelve Ideal Cities
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In 1971, two years after the completion of The Continuous Monument, as another component to the ‘didactic essays’, as Natalini called them, AD magazine published ‘The Twelve Cautionary tales of Christmas: Premonitions of a Mystic Rebirth of Urbanisation’, or since known as the ‘Twelve Ideal Cities’. These tales supposedly represented ‘the supreme achievements of twenty thousand years of civilization’, an allegory on modern utopias in the twentieth century. They are stories in which humanity has taken a technology, or concept, and run with it to its natural finale, like an evolutionary branch followed to its very tip, where a solution to living is formed. They depict stable worlds, with stable human systems, which are explained as being reached accidentally. These describe our world having chosen different routes through progress, different branches, leading to the result of humanity, and consequently a dystopian society. This was due to no foresight, where we didn’t realise the effects of implementing and developing certain technologies.
As Macmillan may have said when discussing the future path of politics: ‘Events, my dear boy, Events’ Without the hand of Superstudio’s messiah one has little control over our future.
Superstudio, ‘Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas’, Architectural Design, (1971), 737742
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Fifth City: City of the hemispheres
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The world ‘City of hemispheres’ is defined by a mirrored lake, formed through a grid of ten million crystalline sarcophagi. Inside lies immobile individuals, incubated without conscience, being supplied with all bodily needs.
Humans are fed sensory stimuli through floating hemispheres that explore the world around the crystal lake which they are incarcerated, being the humans recipient for sight, smell and all sensation, drifting about, these drone like objects can be seen in states of ‘profound meditation’ or ‘sublime love’, depending on their orientation.
I see this as a future, or alternate world where we have mastered the ability to simulate all of a humans necessary experiences. Achieving this to the extent that it is far more efficient for one to remain in this dream like state, where for millennia, people’s only experience will be a restricting but satisfying life.
This, being the fifth Cautionary Tale of Christmas, is one of my favourites. But all critique such different aspects of civilization, making one reconsider the norms of our own society.
Superstudio, p.739
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Seventh city: Continuous production conveyor belt city
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‘The city moves, unrolling like a majestic serpent, over new lands, taking its 8 million inhabitants on a ride through valleys and hills, from the mountains to the seashore, generation after generation’
‘The Grand Factory devours shreds of useless nature and unformed minerals at its front end and emits sections of completely formed city, ready for use, from its back end.’
Like a giant lawn mower, that's trimmings are the city that it leaves behind, that decays after just four years, inhabitants strive to live as close to this mechanism as possible. Taking its people to areas of natural beauty and leaving behind a trail of rubble. bringing forth an awareness of consumerism and our lack of respect for the future of this earth.
At the end of the article there was a questionnaire, the only writing outside of the 12 Tales in this issue of 15 AD: ‘How many would you like to come true?’ To which most would answer: ‘You didn’t want any of the cities to come true’ This is followed by a description determined by this result: ‘So, you feel selfsatisfied, but you shouldn’t. Because you have not caught on: you haven’t understood that the descriptions represent cities now.’
Superstudio, p.740 Ibid., p. 742
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Superstudio are trying to shake us into realizing that a description of our world read by an inhabitant of one of the 12 cities, would appear equally as absurd and restrictive as our interpretation of theirs. They continue: ‘Hold on, the way is broad, the “technologically advanced” countries are running rapidly along it (ever nearer their goal) and the “developing countries” are following close. You are an idiot. Only if you understood the game from the beginning, can you hope to be saved. From the horror of us and our surroundings...’ This expresses the importance of our history, ‘the game from the beginning’, and its ability to aid us in predicting the conclusion to our world at the moment by further following the path we have already trodden.
The dystopian works may have been channeled by the demonstrations such as the 1968 battle of ‘Valle Giulia’, turning their work to that of the dystopian. The Valle Giulia refers to the faculty of the architecture of La Sapienza Rome university. It was here that the left wing militant students occupied, eventually leading to a clash with police, which a few days later would result in thousands protesting and hundreds injured in the name of a revolution.
During the late 60’s, the youth of the world teaming together through new media such as television, a tool of choice and political identity for the revolutionaries, leading to an uprising against biological and chemical weapons, and for feminism, civil liberties, repressive governments, as well as the beginning of the ecological movement. If not dealt with, these issues posed a bleak future for Superstudio’s generation, and this is perhaps what led to the exploration of the ‘negative utopias’.
Religion In the storyboard of the Continuous Monument, SuperStudio have demonstrated a world where architecture takes on the role of the intelligent designer, left free from all but the fundamental laws of geometry, and thus creating a fabric resembling our existence. This person, a God of architecture, conducts the formation of the Continuous Monument, that works in harmony with humanity, as both us and this God are part of a greater whole.
A few years later we are faced with negative and scathing utopias in ‘The Twelve Ideal Cities’, a critique of modernism and urban development pushed to extremes. Demonstrating situations that we as humanity might find ourselves, balanced situations, but where one lives and knows nothing of life's full potential, and is instead numb to the purgatory they have formed around them.
The theory Superstudio expresses against the thoughtlessness of mankind's evolution, and our need for an Intelligent designer to guarantee avoiding the dead ends described in ‘The Tales of Christmas’, seems to demonstrate a concern for our ever lacking confidence in religion. Throughout their work, Superstudio has treasured the power of monuments, and now, with the gradual fall in faith in the developed world, such achievements as ziggurats, cathedrals, and Aztec temples, or anything of that relative scale and labour, will no longer be created in current society or the future. Religion had the ability to shape minds, and unite thoughts; it would cloud our subconscious with beliefs of the afterlife or rebirth, but now instead we have become agitated, counting down our days from birth, we are no longer sitting in God's waiting room, but instead have a limited time to experience everything we have ever known. Although never being aware of the Internet and its power over modern society, Superstudio’s such desire for a religion, or more so a likemindedness formed by a strengthened union between all of humanity, resembles a similar hippy fascist ethos, where one is free but only in the bounds of a fascist system, that is now arising from the World Wide Web. Their last major work demonstrates this union with a monument that embodies humanity’s likemindedness, forming a physical web so wholesome that one desires nothing more.
Supersurface
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It is Superstudio’s final work, between 197273, that led them to a realm far beyond a household definition of architecture.
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‘Architecture never touches the great themes, the fundamental themes of our lives.’
It is for this reason that their final proposal was titled: Fundamental Acts: Life and Death.
Lang, pp. 176202 Braham, p.177
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I interpret this piece, which demonstrates a clean cut solution for human existence, as the logical conclusion of all of Superstudio’s research and discoveries. It is structured as a grid on which our paramount experiences can be had, it can be seen as the 13th Tale of Christmas describing a world in harmony having tapped back into our primitive ways, reinvigorating what it means to be human. This arose through engaging with the great themes of life, creating an architecture based on 5 fundamental acts: Life, Education, Ceremony, Love and Death. These themes came together to form a ‘thesis on the metamorphosis of architecture into life’, where architects pursue a deep rooted expression of themselves, dismissing the profession’s construct: what it means to be an architect in modern day society.
The grid, or Supersurface, is formed through the increase of data and energy exchanges between cities, initially forming a web, a delaunay mesh, that begins to take the shape of a grid. These connections increase to the extent that land becomes a plane of only pipes, wires and cables, and as one can tap into its resources at any point, cities are no longer considered necessary. We therefore become nomads, whose home is wherever we choose. On ‘plugging in’, the grid fabricates ‘the invisible dome’, a microclimate around you, and provides you with all you require, from ‘information’ to ‘blended water’. Once again 18 Superstudio has created a system to which ‘the grass of your neighbour is no longer greener than yours...’ 19 as it provides so wholesomely, that one desires nothing more: ‘a free grid of inhabitation’.
I can almost interpret this concept as a physical embodiment of the Internet, establishing the Internets anarchistic ways in a rational program, where one is free within the parameters of the system.
Conclusion Through my essay, I have proposed that Superstudios Utopian vision may be reached by Artificial intelligence through the rise of the Internet, acting as a tool for composing these Utopias, or even becoming the intelligent designer. The figure of this Messiah I have theorized, as well as the Internet and the Supersurface, all demonstrate a union in human interactions and information. A union that improves the quality of life for that individual to the extent that no one requires anything but this sensation of wholeness and completion, reinvigorating our primitive humanistic ways, and thus tying us to the earth and the geometry of the universe. Lang, p. 182 Ibid., p.183
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Bibliography: Lang, Peter & William Menking, Superstudio: A Life Without Objects (Milan: Skira Editore S.p.A, 2003) Braham, William W. & Jonathan A. Hale, Rethinking Technology (Oxon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 195202. Coates, Nigel, Narrative Architecture (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2012), pp. 3741 Cook, Peter, ‘Natalini Superstudio’, in The Architectural Review 171 (1982), pp. 4851 Design Museum Touring Exhibition, ‘ Superstudio’, L ondon Design Museum, (2003) < http://design.designmuseum.org/design/superstudio > [accessed 20 March 2015] Superstudio, ‘Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas’, in AD 12 (December 1971), 737 742. Lang, Peter & William Menking, Superstudio: A Life Without Objects (Milan: Skira Editore S.p.A, 2003) Stauffer, Marie Theres, ‘Utopian Reflections, Reflected Utopias’, in AA files 4 7 (7 October 2002), 2336.
All Images from: Lang, Peter & William Menking, Superstudio: A Life Without Objects (Milan: Skira Editore S.p.A, 2003)