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. 

Di Francia was responsible for some of the group’s most well-known provocations, including The Continuous Monument proposal, a project that envisioned architecture at a global scale, anticipating, in a way, contemporary approaches to geo-engineering, world-building, and other large-scale building concepts. 

In 1969 text supporting The Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanization, the group writes: “In architecture, critical activity has always been connected with the concept of utopia; utopia is not an alternative model: it puts forward unresolved problems (not ‘problem solving’ but ‘problem finding’). We could say that the original motive of utopia is hope. Utopia is the true preparation for projecting, as play is preparation of life. The revolutionary charge of utopia, the hope which is at its foundation and the criticism which is its direct consequence, is to bring back its dignity as a rational, ordering activity.”