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Adolfo Natalini, co-founder of Superstudio, has passed away at age 78

2020-01-24T20:24:00-05:00

Adolfo Natalini, who, along with Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, co-founded the visionary architects' collective Superstudio, has passed away at age 78.

Natalini was born on May 10, 1941 in Pistoia, Italy. He attended the University of Florence, graduating in 1966. That year, he and di Francia, who passed away just last year, founded Superstudio. The designers Piero Frassinelli and Alessandro and Roberto Magris joined in short order and the rest is history.

View of Superstudio’s iconic “Continuous Monument” proposal. Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, Howard Gilman Foundation.

Together the design collective worked to extend architectural imagination to include the so-called radical architettura movement that the team helped to propel into being through visionary works like The Continuous Monument collage series, among many others. The group dissolved in 1978.

Torre Natalini (Roermond) in The Netherlands. Image courtesy of © Raimond Spekking.

In the years following, Natalini ...

“In which the solid buildings would be replaced by the accumulation of foam”

2019-08-19T14:30:00-04:00

Prada Poole conceives the city of the future through what he calls “the three stages of a nonexistent architecture.” In this conception, the traditional city would, in successive transformations, morph into an immaterial city, without inertia, in which the solid buildings would be replaced by the accumulation of foam that would “appear and disappear, converge and disperse according to the different needs.”

Antonio Cobo examines the revolutionary work of Hippie Modernist architect and theorist Jose Miguel Prada Poole for Mas Context.

Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs: The Opera

2014-04-24T16:27:00-04:00

It's the urban planning equivalent of Rinaldo. Except instead of the siege of Jerusalem, it's the battle for Greenwich Village. The legendary 1960s struggle pitted planning czar Robert Moses against neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs. Moses wanted to make the city easily navigable by car [...] But the powerful planner met his match when he proposed an expressway through Lower Manhattan. Though she had little institutional support, Jacobs built a citizen coalition that ultimately defeated Moses.