1. Superstudio seemed eager to throw out every convention that they associated with Modern architecture. Why?
2. Describe some of the political and economic circumstances in Florence that created the environment out of which Superstudio emerged.
3. What are some of the ideas behind the "Continuous Monument"?
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Firstly, what did modern architecture mean to Superstudio? The group saw it as design for the public, architecture for the many, and creation of "models of ownership and society" (as Natalini says). "We can live without architecture," Natalini also says in regards to modern architecture. Superstudio wanted to build for the sake of building. Most critics did not take Superstudio's concepts seriously because most of them were "impossible and playful" architectural designs. And that is mostly what the wanted to achieve: designs that were for no specific purpose and did not necessarily make sense to the consumer or even society in general.
ReplyDeleteThe Continuous Monument "is a single piece of architecture to be extended over the whole world" (p. 53). In my opinion, the Continuous Monument was a complete rebellion against modern architecture for the sake of satire and humor. However, this idea was not without intent and serious consideration, which makes it all the more humorously genius. This idea of separating humans from their natural environment, in Superstudio's vision, was to emphasize the ever growing takeover of consumerism in society at the time.
Not unlike today, the younger generation of the 1960s played a huge part in Superstudio's foundation. University systems were struggling and not informing students of architectural plans for the future, and the students were fed up with the way things were handled. Superstudio was inspired to design as they did because they saw a need for consumerism to stop and the free architect to be free again. Consumerism in Europe had a huge rise and then a fall, and Superstudio was engaging in that in every way it could.
The "Piper" project is great (p. 63).
1+2 (combined answer)
ReplyDeleteModern architecture brainwashed society to consume more, made people not to be free, "Reasons as the explanation" was tearing people apart. The setting of the politically charged Italian in the 60's fermented a group of young thinkers, students that wanted to shake the old paradigm. Living in a period of the least availability of materials and scarce economy, the architects had a hard time trying to build an physical space. The time was just right for theoretical part of the Italian architecture to come into play versus the actual architectural practice. The so called "radical" Superstudio took full advantage of the giving situation.
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The Continuous Monument showcased their conceptual work to the public. The core belief was politically super charged and they precieved the world of architecture to be stuck in a gated community. Superstudio criticized the elitism, cynicism, and unjust social division of the architecture of its time. The reading of the Continuous Monument is not about architecture for the sake of building but to "highjack the language of architecture" to find new critical meanings in the world. I find this notion to be very similar to the Beat Generation of America.
1. The goal of Superstudio was to “un-design” their surroundings like no other group had done before. Their process consisted of a strict critical vision focused on their own roles in the much larger chain of production. The article states, “Superstudio succeeded in cleansing architecture of all sources of contamination.” It tried to remove all commercially driven clutter from an object, or architecture. They wanted to eliminate the accumulation of formal structures of power, because it was believed that the city suggests a hierarchy. They wanted to start over, and by that they were able to establish categories like “architecture of the monument,” the “architecture of the image,” and “technomorphic architecture.”
ReplyDelete2. By the end of the 1960s, Italy had declined economically. Fortunately, it had lead to a new, definitive and momentous transformation in design and architecture. The increasingly weakening crisis in Modernist architecture found its most last few acts played out on the drawing boards at this time in Florence. Superstudio recognized that “architecture” served to indoctrinate society into an irrelevant culture of consumption, and therefore sought to extract out of architecture all that encumbered on man’s ability to live a free life.
3. Developed in 1969, The Continuous Monument was an image of the Superstudio that “spread its glacially translucent grid structures throughout the entire regions of the planet, enveloping buildings and entire cities.” The Continuous Monument is described as a “monument to end all monuments.” It was designed by Superstudio as “a single piece of architecture to be extended over the whole world…” It indecorously neutralized layers of gratuitous historical symbolisms associated with the making of monumental architecture.
1. Superstudio felt that it was necessary to throw out all of the conventions of architecture because they felt that architecture encumbered on society and the way that people live. They felt that this was inappropriate and that the only way to change this was to ignore all of the current conventions of architecture and start from scratch.
ReplyDelete2. Around the time when Superstudio was created in Italy there was a huge economic change happening. Until the 1960’s Italy was prospering but then there was a market crash and the people needed to find a new way of life. This inspired Superstudio to create a new for of architecture inspired by the need for a new lifestyle due to the new economic climate.
3. The “Continuous Monument” was based around the idea that the principals could be applied anywhere and were not based on a specific technology. The “Continuous Monument” was meant to neutralize the ideas of architecture instead of being a specific style it was more of a concept.
1. SUPERSTUDIO was largely a group of reductionists. Their work and beliefs included the idea that “architecture served to indoctrinate society into an irrelevant culture of consumption”. They were wildly against the use of Radical architecture and high design because of it’s perpetuation of the proliferation of the commercialization and exploitation of the design market. A class taught at the Universiy of Florence called Extra-Urban Material Culture focused on the use of recycled materials and very simple methods and objects for living. This class inspired many of the thought processes of the group. SUPERSTUDIO members believed in anti-architecture as a way of improving life by eliminating social hierarchy and creating a level field of play (and eliminating the concept of “city”).
ReplyDelete2. SUPERSTUDIO was operating in a post-war society with diminished and destroyed landscapes and buildings. Post-war reconstruction was dreadfully unorganized which led to devastating results—poor service facilities, unstable buildings, and no regulation to ensure effective building strategies. We also find Florence to be in a state of rebellious student and youth culture. Students were forced to take hold of their own academic future and had to force change upon academic institutions as this change was not happening from within. Occupations and strikes from fed up students charged the air with the need for change. This strong architectural socio-political climate was fueled also by the failed reconstruction of Florence’s city center, lack of proper expanse for the growing population, and the student’s activist motivations to shape the School of Architecture (at the University of Florence) to allow for experimentation and receptiveness.
3. The “Continuous Monument” is based on the idea of living without architecture. Architecture that is intended to be built for other reasons than for it’s own sake. Its “static perfection moved the world through the love that it creates”. A utopia that is achieved by anti-utopia--a world deconstructed by the complete lack of consumer products. SUPERSTUDIO’s philosophy was also based on the idea that the destruction of object destroys the status that is associated with that object. Elimination of city eliminates the social structure of that city. This “Contunous Monument” also neutralizes monumental architecture as historical symbols serve as an “alternative model of existence”.
1. For Superstudio, the connections between "modern architecture" and consumer-driven culture were no longer acceptable. Superstudio sought to disassociate architecture from beaucratic convention and models of hierarchy. From the 1967 writing EVASION DESIGN AND INVENTION DESIGN: "We need in fact to begin all over again: the data are those of myth, those of technology and consumer demand, those of repressed desire."
ReplyDeleteSuperstudio wanted to utilized architecture as a means of social change, a new beginning.
2. Postwar Italy was a time of economic downfall and social unrest. The old models of consumer-driven culture and hierarchy were clearly unstable and inconsisent. Young people and creative thinkers were duely questioning these models and seeking a new direction for society. Superstudio emerged from this climate of thought and sought to use architecture as a primary force for a egalitarian based social order.
3. The "Continous Movement" is Superstudio's chief expression of their social ideals and how this can be represented in a new architecture. To me, the power of the "Continous Movment" lies not in its literal or objective weight, but in its conceptual expression of the new direction for society. This is an abstract model of the new path that Superstudio seeks to pave with an architecture liberated from hierarchy and convention.
Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia founded SuperStudio shortly after finishing their architecture studies in Florence. The studio represented a conceptual response to the conditions of post-war Italy (and especially post-war Florence) encountered by the young architects. The country was becoming more urban, more industrialized and more modern; but also more chaotic, more alienated, and more oriented toward consumerism. The same Modernism that provided opportunities was also destabilizing traditional cultures and values. The SuperStudio architects saw this on the whole as corrosive and therefore sought to throw out the tenets and forms of Modernism.
ReplyDeleteThese ideas about "alienation, rationalization, neuroses..." formed the "underlying critique" of the studio.
The Continuous Monument was an elaboration of the theories the group had been developing for several years. The work, which took the form of storyboards, describes a giant, world-wide super structure. A monument to end all monuments.
The paradox, noted several times in the text, is that SuperStudio advocated a more egalitarian, utopian, non-materialistic society while simultaneously proposing a huge, vaguely Modernist looking global monument. Did Natalini intend for this to be ironic? Or did he see the Continuous Monument as a "neutralizing" effect on the consumer culture he so opposed?
Modern architecture was an unnecessary architectural luxury aimed at a society that could afford the aesthetic. Superstudio understood the economic standing of Florence and decided to design not AT the consumer, but FOR life's actual needs. And in mocking modern architecture, designed the satire of what Utopian modern architecture was going for: the "Continuous Monument." "As the Radical movement's cover child," Superstudio took advantage of youthful popularity, knowing that to lead to change, you can be the extreme example so that the culture leans into rationality. Into moderation. They were playfully radical because they could be. They were the youth-minded ideas; and what did Florence have to lose?
ReplyDelete1. The associations the group gathered from standard modern architectural practices were those of progress towards consumerism. The social pressure and demand, highly centered around new technologies, were something that the group chose to reject, instead looking for a way to “reduce” architecture to basic fundamental elements separate from the controlling elements of pop culture. (13.)
ReplyDelete2. The Florentine setting, at the time of Superstudio’s work there, was in a time of economic decline but modernist architectural focus. The “radical architecture” movement that the group found itself within was problematic because there was a lack of consensus in definitions within the goals of radial politics, art, and ideology that afforded separate architects to work together. (13-14.)
3. The Continuous Monument was created with the hopes of creating architecture that could exist outside of the realm of simply building, to create environments free of objects that bind them to the consumer society, and to shift the role of the architect as creator. (20-25.)
1. Due to their restriction in the academic setting of Italy, Superstudio felt like the modernist traditions upheld by their teachers and local communities were stagnant and useless. Due to this oppression, both political and social, they elected to branch out and eschew the paradigms thrust upon them by the institution.
ReplyDelete2. Florence flooded, causing the city to rethink their architecture and have to rebuild some of their traditional structures. Fascism was creating a huge problem for freethinkers in Italy. However, instead of reaching out to the youth, the Italian/Florentine government chose to use traditional architects and not involve the eager students in their redevelopment of infrastructure. As a result, Superstudio formed their own semi-idealistic/imaginary program where they created solutions to new world problems in an innovative way. Funnily, most of their work ended up looking pretty traditionally Modern.
3. The Continuous monument was an idea that hoped to destroy the idea of the overbearing monument of old and replace it with free spaces beyond building. This would allow the architect to branch into the realm of artist, creator, designer, and beyond, and in fact unite all realms of thought into one creative process.