Architecture and Dystopia

Learning from No-Stop City: Archizoom’s Utopia Revisited Marie Therese Stauffer

In December 1969 the Archizoom group of architects published a series of photomontages that can be described as utopian proposals for ways of positioning large-scale architectural volumes in the city or countryside.1 The volumes appear enveloped in planer, unarticulated surfaces that mainly take the shape of geometrized bodies or frame structures. Several of the photomontages also feature more identifiable forms—for example, a series of rocky pinnacles, a rectangular rod with fleshy leaves, and a gigantic spoon. One image is in the shape of a lightning-flash, stamped into the urban texture of Bologna and representing Archizoom’s logo (figs. 1–3).2 By 1969 the Archizoom group consisted of the architects Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, Massimo Morozzi, Dario Bartolini, and Luisa Bartolini-Morozzi. Founded in 1966, the Florence-based group had begun to gain recognition in the field of design.3 In their urban photomontages, these architects were now turning toward the “architecture of the city.”4

Shaped Volumes As a starting-point for discussion, one photomontage from the series may be singled out. It shows an imaginary intervention in the historic city center of Florence and consists of an orthogonal structure surrounding the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (fig. 4). The ca-

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Architecture and Dystopia

Published on Apr 14, 2020

Actar Publishers

Editor: Dario Donetti. As a response to the profound crisis of Western culture the emerged in the 1960s, radical artists from Italy, Austria, England and Japan called into question the foundations of modernist utopias. They transmuted the difficulties of capitalism into a repertory of startling images that revealed the disturbing realities of consumer society, even in those places still resistant to the penetration of modern architecture, such as Superstudio and Archizoom’s Florence. Their model, though exhausted in the space of experimentation, went on to inspire a generation of architects, who sought to employ the paradigm of dystopia as both a visionary and a constructive method, one which could operate on the architecture of late capitalism and generate unexpected possibilities for urban planning. Authors: Dario Donetti, Marco De Michelis, Oliver Elser, Dominique Rouillard, Marco Biraghi, Marie Theres Stauffer, Maddalena Scimemi, Simon Sadler, Massimiliano Savorra, Anthony Vidler.