Superstudio: consuming cities
Continuing my research on collages and assemblages, and after complaining about the lack of attention cultural geographers get in comparison to architects and urban planners, I thought I’d give some time to SUPERSTUDIO, those radical young Italian architects who were even more absurd than Archigram - and more critical.
Adolfo Natalini once said that “in a period of redundancy and false problems…every act with a tendency to clarity, and every object made with the instruments of reason, appears as a black stone fallen from the sky in the desert.”
And if Walking City is my favourite Archigram project, then Seventh City: Continuous Conveyor Belt City is my favourite Superstudio project. Part of 1971’s “Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas” storyboard of 12 ideal-cities for Architectural Design, Piero Frassinelli’s original text is worth quoting at length:
The city moves, unrolling like a majestic serpent; over new lands, taking its 8 million inhabitants on a ride through valleys and hills, from the mountains to the seashore, generation after generation. The head of the city is the Grand Factory, 4 miles wide and 100 yards high, like the city it continuously produces … The Grand Factory devours shreds of useless nature and unformed minerals at its front end and emits sections of completely formed city, ready for use, from its back end.
The greatest aspiration of every citizen is to move more and more often into a new house because the houses produced are continually modernized and equipped with the yet more perfect commodities that the Administrative Council invents for the joy of the citizens. The Great Families move monthly into the houses just built, following the rhythm of the Grand Factory. The other citizens do their best and only those with little willpower and the laziest wait for four years before moving house. Luckily, it is not possible to live in the same house for more than four years after its construction; after this period, objects, accessories and the structure of the houses themselves decay, become unusable and soon after collapse. Only society’s rejects, mad or insane individuals, still dare to wander amongst the ruins, the detritus and rubble that the city leaves behind it.
What could be more stimulating than the continual rivalry between all citizens in trying to live on parallel streets with the most recent dates? What day could be happier than when you move into your new house, and your Director gives you a day off on special grounds and congratulates you? What hour could be happier than when you enter your new home and discover all your new things, your new equipment, your new clothes and everything else the Grand Factory has prepared for you?
Admire the city from above, with its great black head, plumed with the smoke of thousands of factory chimneys, with its tidy body 8 miles long, with at its centre the grandiose crest of skyscrapers, flanked by great blocks of popular housing estates, and stretches of villas with gardens at the edges; with its interminable wake of rubble indicating the ground covered.
Oh wow.
And adding to Thomas’ links:
Superstudio: Allegorical Networks
The Guardian Unlimited: Anti-matter
Voluntary Prisoners: A Review of Superstudio: Life without Objects
Trespassing by Chris Grimley
Life without objects: Ivrea’s Building as Interface group wiki