Archinect - News

Superstudio exhibition on view at CIVA

2021-02-12T18:34:00-05:00

The starting point of everything Superstudio did was dissatisfaction with the uniformity of modern architecture, which its left-wing members saw as an instrument of capitalism that disempowered the masses, robbing them of their individuality and freedom. Sometimes, they made fun of the status quo, or took it to absurd conclusions; other times, they imagined utopian futures.

The exhibition Superstudio Migrazioni about the radical Italian "anti-architecture" collective runs until Sunday, May 16 at CIVA in Brussels.

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 ...

Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, co-founder of Superstudio, has passed away

2019-08-01T13:51:00-04:00

Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, co-founder of the radical Italian architecture group Superstudio, has passed away at age 78.

Di Francia, born in 1941, started Superstudio in 1966 with Adolfo Natalini; Eventually, the group grew to include Piero Frassinelli, and Alessandro and Roberto Magris. As one of several influential groups of the Radical Architecture era, Superstudio’s critical, utopian architectural visions helped to reshape the way architects were taught to consider their role in the construction of the world’s built environment. Their experiments using illustrations, collages, and other popular forms of reproducible media to communicate architectural ideas allowed the designers to help explode antiquated notions of what architecture should look like, how it should be consumed, and who, ultimately, was included in the audience architects spoke to.

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

How far off were the radical architects of the 1960s?

2018-12-31T12:53:00-05:00

The 1960s, a time when possibilities and technologies in many areas — artistic, political, scientific — seemed broader than ever, remain a seductive decade. Fifty years on from the first moon landing we need to remember that the most striking image from space (and the one that had the most real impact) were not those of the dusty, dead surface of the moon but those of our own planet, glimpsed as something delicate, whole and beautiful.

The future used to look brighter.

This may be the feeling gained when looking back at some of the most radical visions from familiar names in architecture. Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom and Cedric Price each took their shot at a future based on post-war rhetoric, and we continue to marvel at the gap between their expectations and our reality.

Walking City, by Archigram

But this gap may be wider and more troublesome than anyone could have imaged at the time of these images of the imagined future were produced, according to Financial Times writer Edwin Heathcote. Looking back at the future of the 1960's from the 2010's might, in fact, be our way of coping with our precarious future, Heathcote argues. "All this is an escapist fantasy," he writes, "a way of sublimating our awareness of catastrophic climate change and our guilt at participating in the economies that fuel it."

No Stop City, by Archizoom

Heathcote ends his compelling article with a warning against the provocation of ...

The city as fulfillment center: architects envision New York after Amazon

2018-11-28T14:19:00-05:00

One of ARO’s two concepts shows a huge white building emblazoned with the Amazon logo. [...] It’s a never-ending fulfillment center that the architects dub “Continuous Fulfillment.” According to ARO principals Adam Yarinsky and Stephen Cassell, the idea is an homage to a 1969 concept from the Italian radical architecture firm Superstudio called “The Continuous Monument.” The idea posits that technology will render the built environment uniform, turning buildings into white monoliths.

The billion-dollar cat is out of the bag, and Amazon will soon be ascending on Long Island City, New York and Crystal City/Arlington, Virginia to split its anticipated, tax-incentivized HQ2.

As both regions prepare for the new neighbor to move in, Fast Company asked AIA New York State firm of the year, Architecture Research Office (ARO), to envision an Amazonian New York. The firm provided two (rather dystopian) tongue-in-cheek concepts.

Here's a dose of design inspiration from Superstudio, the radical 1960s "anti-architecture" collective whose influence continues today

2016-04-13T18:23:00-04:00

HALF A CENTURY AGO, a group of 20-something architecture students from Florence decided to assume the small task of conceiving an alternative model for life on earth. Contemptuous of the long reign of Modernism, which they felt had sold itself as a cure to society’s ills and never delivered, they were jazzed by American science-fiction novels and the political foment of the 1960s. They gave themselves the colorfully assured name Superstudio...

SALT releases "Global Tools 1973-1975"

2015-07-03T13:09:00-04:00

I am so pleased to announce that Global Tools is now out. Edited by Valerio Borgonuovo and Silvia Franceschini, contributions by Manola Antonioli, Valerio Borgonuovo, Alison J. Clarke, Beatriz Colomina, Silvia Franceschini, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco Raggi, Simon Sadler, and Alessandro Vicari. If Graham Foundation wants to "like" it, there is a facebook page -Vasif Kortun, SALT

GLOBAL TOOLS 1973-1975

In January 1973, a gathering took place in Milan at the editorial office of the magazine ‘Casabella,’ involving, among others, the architects and designers Ettore Sottsass Jr., Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi, Riccardo Dalisi, Remo Buti, Ugo La Pietra, Franco Raggi, Davide Mosconi, and members of the groups Archizoom, 9999, Superstudio, UFO and Zziggurat. Together with the conceptual artists and intellectuals Franco Vaccari, Giuseppe Chiari, Luciano Fabro and Germano Celant, they founded Global Tools - a system of workshops that would last until 1975.

For the first time in the forty years that have passed since its formation, the experience of the Global Tools counter-school has been brought together in book form by SALT, uniting the images and archive documents that were produced over the few short years of its existence. This volume is compiled to chronicle and evaluate the three years of seminar activity that took place between Florence, Milan and Naples i...