The architecture group, Superstudio, was founded in Florence in 1966, the year I graduated from architecture school. I remember their projects from the Italian design mag Domus, which I used to leaf through in the library. I didn’t like them then and I don’t like them now. “Although Superstudio built very few actual buildings, its witty photo collages and designs, presented in exhibitions and glossy magazine spreads, opened up new possibilities for what architecture and urban planning could be,” opines a fawning article in the New York Times. The new possibilities included a nihilistic view of architecture masquerading as a fashionable left-wing critique. The Times quotes the last surviving member of the group: “Seeing the dystopias of your own imagination being created is not the best thing you could wish for.” But were they really dystopias? In its muddleheaded way, Superstudio (what pretension!) wanted to have its radical critique and eat it too, which may be why those early collages of implacably gridded buildings marching across the landscape influenced the work of Meier, Koolhaas, Holl, et al. Another possibility that Superstudio opened up was branding; in 1970 they designed a line of furniture for Zanotta. Gridded, of course.
RADICAL CHIC
