Postwar Culture

Superstudio emerged from the radical architecture movements of the late 1960s. The firm was founded in 1966 in Florence, Italy, by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia. They had studied architecture at the University of Florence with Andrea Branzi, the founder of Archizoom, and they presented their ideas about the crisis of modernism in the Superarchitettura exhibition held in Pistoia, Italy, in 1966. Superstudio soon expanded to include Alessandro and Roberto Magris and Piero Frassinelli, and the five young architects continued to live in Florence after graduation. The city played a critical role in their 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,” Toraldo di Francia claimed. “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.”

In 1967, Natalini laid out three categories of research that would drive and determine the firm’s projects: architecture of the monument, architecture of the image, and technomorphic architecture. During these early years, Superstudio espoused a utopian vision for social change through architecture, but by 1968, they had dismissed this notion as overly optimistic. The following year they revealed what was to become their best-known motif: a seemingly infinite framework of black-and-white grid extending across the surface of the earth. This megalithic structure, which they called Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanization, was meant to critique what Superstudio saw as the absurdities and impotence of contemporary urban planning. They produced photocollages that showed the grid blanketing various natural landscapes and urban sites around the world.

Many of their projects were published in the magazine Casabella, presented in the form of short fiction, storyboard illustrations, and, most famously, photomontage. In the early 1970s, Superstudio produced several films to raise awareness of the potentially detrimental impact of construction on the environment, at a time when this issue was seldom raised. The collective dissolved in 1978, but its members continued to develop similar ideas independently, through writing, design, and architecture.