Superstudio
1. Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, “Memories of Superstudio,” in Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations, 1956–1976, ed. Martin Van Schaik and Otakar Máčel (Munich: Prestel, 2005), 70.
One of the most powerful representations of Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1969) depicts a fish-eye view of the project stretching from East River to Manhattan to the extremely curved horizon. By occupying both foreground and background with the Monument, the image represents the unstoppable continuity of the project around the planet, and offers a seemingly impossible scalar reconciliation between the monument, the skyscrapers of the transformed New York City—renamed as New New York—and the globe. Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, a founding member with Adolfo Natalini of Superstudio, notes yet another of the central propositions contained in the image.1 In Manhattan, the Continuous Monument frames and contains a fragment of the city, the downtown skyscrapers preserved within a rectangle. Toraldo di Francia argues that the tradition of modern urbanism conceived the metropolis as the way to transform an original nature, which was preserved as a vestige within the urban fabric—paradigmatically in Le Corbusier’s voids and, to the case, in New York’s Central Park [project 15]. By preserving skyscrapers as relics, the Continuous Monument emphasizes that it represents a new stage and a new scale of civilization, one for which the modern metropolis is only an archaeological remain. At this stage, the planet is the only possible scale of reference. The first sketches Superstudio does for the project—titled Viaduct of Architecture as a competition entry for the 1969 Tri-national Biennial Trigon, in Graz, Austria—depict the thesis even more dramatically. All the metropolises of the world explode. The dispersed elements of their urban fabric at first orbit above the earth and then progressively coalesce to form a single built structure around the world. Superstudio’s whole production in the period 1968–1972 constitutes a constant investigation of this postmetropolitan world scale. In the Continuous Monument, a built infrastructure circumvents the world as a new parallel. Interplanetary Architecture (1970–1971) envisages a single Earth-Moon entity, bringing the satellite closer to our planet and linking both by building a connective infrastructure. Three Projects for the Planet (1971) suggests three planetary alternatives: to contain the earth within a cube, to dig a gigantic cube in it—from the earth’s crust to its core—and to create an equatorial, built ring. During the same years, Twelve Ideal Cities proposes to reconfigure the settlement structure of the planet with new urban models. They occupy rivers, deserts, prairies, the atmosphere, and the interplanetary space. Five Fundamental Acts (1972) addresses “the relationship between architecture (as the conscious formalization
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