Superstudio: PaperArchitecture

DAN IELLE DUVAL

The ascendancy of reproducible media, specifically photographic or flat-based technology, has altered many established methodologies of architectural practice. This shift in thinking has not only been a formal and stylistic one, but more importantly metaphysical. Superstudio, founded in Florence by a group of radical young architects in 1966, imagined a thoroughly oblique relationship between visual approaches to building and their end result. At the outset, buildings cannot come to pass without first being mirrored in schematic designs or constructs, like the storyboards used in advertising, film, TV, and publication. But this also exposes an inherent technological bias: reproduction has the potential to summon forth unforeseen or improbable futures that are immediate and relevant because operationally detached from direct acts of perception or construction. Superstudio (which abandoned working as a collective in 1978) attempted to beat consumer society's increasingly positivist drive at its own game, while at the same time turning functionalist principles on their head.

Zanotta began manufacturing in 1970, gave the group a crash course in following planning through to completion stage. Sensitized to the lived spaces inherent in commercial design, they well understood the need to oppose "architect[ure] that remains at the margin," one that "provides solutions to rigidly stated problems." 2 (Fascist architecture, for instance,

Postwar Italian architecture, especially during the period when Superstudio founding members Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, the Magris brothers, and Piero Frassinelli were students, was divided between an entrenched -7`7174 modernist or neo-clasZ % sical tradition and various university projects. The universities basically spearheaded postwar reconstruction by imitating established methods and styles, while often overlooking nontraditional proposals from professors and students.' Such an overriding preoccupation with the past preserved historical conventions and privileged formalist structures of planning and construction. This static climate, one totally oblivious to the potentially negative environmental impact of modern architecture, tended to alienate younger architects and forced them to develop methods of integration that were better suited to their changing circumstances. Superstudio's view of architecture was one attuned to an unstated equivalence (and equivocation) between the ideological and material phases of consumer production. Early product designs, like the grid-patterned Quaderna furniture that
I. See Peter Lang, "Suicidal Desires" in Superstudio: Life without Objects, ed. Peter Lang andWilliam Menking (Milan: Skira, 2003), 34, 2. Quotes from Superstudio (1968), in Cristiano Toraldo di Francia,"Memories ofSuperstudio," Life without Objects, 66. 3. Life Without Objects, 68 (translationmodified),

glorified order in the name of history.) Superstudio's insistence on reconfiguration and the radical transformation of architectural ideals enabled the group to move away from strictures of the past and address, at least symbolically, both present and future ones.

To their mind, the promise of modernization did not offer intellectual freedom, but imposed yet another kind of order and schematization. According to Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, "Through the Modern Movement, industry tried to perform a great public, material, and cultural service for humanity and the urban environment: a logical, rational world, whose linguistic and methodological signs of unity architecture and design helped to establish (or prefigure) from the very beginning." 3 Superstudio questioned modernity's futurist-inspired
4. "... they propose that all the buildingsin the historiccenter [of Pisa] shouldbe made to lean, at the same timestraighteningup the present leaning tower, so as to provide a 'measure' of the inclination ofother buildings .. so that touristscan,for afew hours,feel that they are living in a leaning world" Superstudio, "Restoration Studies," Architectural Design (October1975), 592

(rNP ra eonoa) MEMmes orSuPResinoo, 1970. S5uPRSUoIX, INTERPLANETARY ARMeiTEcTURE, 1972, couwc, CASABELLA #364 (APRIL 19721,48. SuPeeswsiwi, LEAHiNG SEARS TOWER o ,46E, 1975.

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utopia, one realized through and in compliance with technological (and teleological) order. Instead, the group invoked disorder and the illogical to conjure possible futures for architecture,

ones that could be at once complex and irrational, provocative and visionary. In this context, "visions of the future" seems more appropriate terminology. Visions encompass multiple levels of see-

ing, thinking, and being, thus making these experiential categories entirely amorphous. The work that Superstudio began in the late 1960s, like their gridcloaked photo-collages of the Rocky

5UPER-O, FROM THE SUPERSTUDlO CATALOGUES: HISTOGRAMS, 1971, PHOTOGRAPH BY CRISTIANO NORL DiFRAMIA, DOMOS 9497 (APRI 1971), 46. (ONSET) SUPERSTUOIO, TWELVE IDEAL CITIES, 1972.

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Coast, Coketown and Manhattan, imparted a clearly dystopian slant to forward planning and its improbable investment
in progress. Continuous Monument

(1969), depicting cityscapes engulfed in a totally urbanized grid of white cubes, and the group's 1972 plan to make all the buildings in Pisa lean, except for the tower, overturned architecture's former conceptual and physical limitations. 4 In Frassinelli's words, Continuous Monument was a "parable intended as critique,"5 a mythic narrative comprised of texts, drawings, and collages in which an endless black-on-white grid gradually extends itself across the earth's surface. The caption for one image showing Manhattan clenched inultimate geometric embrace remarks that only "a bunch of ancient skyscrapers" will escape, "preserved in memory of a time when cities were built with no single plan." In her introduction to Architectureproduction (1988), Beatriz Colomina distinguishes between architecture and building. She describes architecture as a discursive "critical act," meaning that it entails not only building per se but also models, reproductions, and related documents outlining intent and function. Today's wealth of architecture books, monographs, and magazines testifies to the primacy of mass media in communicating architectural concepts. The prioritization of writing and visualization in

Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau's influential S,M,L,XL (first edition, 1995) is mainly indebted to the critique of modernist architecture initiated in the 1960s and '70s by, among others, the Italian "Superarchitecture" faction and splinter groups like Archizoom and Superstudio. The latter's projects, informed by the tumult of the counterculture, realized a superfluity of ideas and building projects through images, however flighty or contorted this impulse appears in today's deconstructivist masterworks. What has gone largely unchecked is the image's ability to anticipate buildings, to "prefigure" or determine them, and ultimately to replace them. The page or screen remains the principal site of construction, aided and abetted by every conceivable electronic or digital device, in which fantastic projects are simultaneously conceived, displayed, and "thrown"

out (like pottery). In fact, architecture

now occurs in all facets of modern life, from art and fashion magazines to TV sets and movie lots. As forms of pure invention, these efforts are not directly driven by functional or rational necessity, whatever theirties to the consumerist aesthetic. At a minimum, they allow architecture the space to envision fantastic, unprecedented, yet entirely genuine spatial experiences. Indeed, concocting imaginary cures for urban congestion now seems more prevalent than actually creating buildings where people can live or work. In an essay on Gordon Matta-Clark, Dan Graham describes the artist's "intersects" into buildings as so many blows against regimentation in conventional home design, "show[ing] how each individual family has coped with the imposed structure of his container."6 Overly confining, box-like structures preserve aform ofstan-

SwPERSTuOIo (Top aan)RESTORATION STUDIES: PSA, 1975,coLLA6E, ARCHITEOURA DESIEGN RXLV (OEoBwR 1975), 592 (RIGHT) CONTINUOUS MONUMENT, ROCKFELLER CENTER (CITY SERIEs1, 1969, COLLAGE.

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dardization chiefly controlled by agencies whose interests lie in improved efficiency and minimal upkeep, leaving scant room for imaginative or purely social experimentation. Ironically, buildings erected by rote and functionality usually don't survive because they lack the tractability that true habitable space requires. Contemporary architects like Zaha Hadid, Bernard Tschumi and Nigel Coates have proposed novel twists on this old theme, though sharply angled ceilings and blob-like exteriors seem more like afterimages of the surrounding city gridlock. Nowadays, most attempts at architectural critique rarely transpire outside the confines of Photoshop, 3-D
5. Piero Frassinelli,"Journeyto the End of Architecture," Life Without Objects, 80. 6. Dan Graham, Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects, 1965-1990 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). 7. Beatriz Colomina, "Introduction: On Architecture,

modeling, or virtual participation (as in video games, webcams, art installations, etc.). Yet Superstudio didn't believe in virtual inspiration. In the film Ceremony projected above a series of white modules in The Histograms, or The Architect's

Tombs (1969), otherwise earnest exercises in energy efficiency, the group is seen picnicking on top of one of them. Their 1972 proposal to flood Florence by damming the Arno, leaving only the cathedral dome above water, was a direct snub at the conservative Save the Historic Centers campaign. Parody and contradiction were the group's most enduring qualities (compare their selfdestructing mirror-glass dam for Niagara
Production and Reproduction" in Architectu reproduction (New York: PrincetonArchitectural Press, 1988), 15. 8. See Superstudio, "Description of the Micro-Event and Micro-Environment" in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, ed. E.Ambasz (1972), 242-51.

Falls), prioritizing nomadic wandering and deviation over possession and settlement. Reminiscent of Boull6e's architecture parlante or Le Corbusier's cinematic leanings (mass media as "another context of production," as Colomina notes 7), the aim of Superstudio was nothing less than the de-objectification of consumer society. "The objects we will need will be onlyflags or talismans (...) objects that can easily be carried about if we should become nomads, or heavy and immovable if we decide to stay in one place forever."8 As "other contexts," mass media images provide spatial alternatives whereby architecture can juggle its precepts and procedures. This is where architecture comes into its own. Remaining open to random gestures of exaggeration or collision, architecture is technically able to set new standards for how people inhabit this world. The goal of interjection is what architecture should constantly strive after, nurturing itself in multidimensional elaboration. It is this constant unfolding of physical and imaginary space that has continued to offer refuge from the operational strictures of architecture as fill in the gaps throughout the postmodern or postwar era.
DANIELLE DUVAL teaches Panicand Evacuation Dynamics
at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and is a

renowned authorityin multiple personality disorder.The writer is afrequent visitor to Los Angeles.

#364 (APRIL 1972)1 48. ( ARCHITECTU RE, 1972, tC1LA6F, CA5ABELLA SURERSTUDI, (LEFT) INITERPLAETARY

SERIES), 1969, COLAGE. MONUMENT, ROCKY COAST (NATURE T) CONTINUOUS

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