They Never Built a Single Building. How Did This Group Change What People Thought Architecture Was?

They were hippies, philosophers, artists — and architects.

In 1967, when the Italian radical architecture group Superstudio put forward the idea of "Superdesign," they wrote that an object should "activate as many different sensory qualities as possible, be filled with signs and images that catch attention or spark interest, and offer inspiration for behavior and conduct."

The same approach shaped how Superstudio read architecture. They called themselves a group of architects. Oddly, they never finished a single building.

Superstudio's influence has nothing to do with whether they designed buildings that history went on to praise, or founded a style of their own. It lies in how far they pushed the argument about architecture — architecture's relation to our lives, and to basic human acts like being born, growing old, falling ill, and dying. In the 50 years since the group was founded, that way of thinking has shaped one celebrated architect after another: Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid. They absorbed Superstudio's view of architecture, and it became the freest, most captivating side of their own work.

Superstudio held that architecture is not limited to physical matter — that concrete, rebar, and brick stacked up do not amount to architecture itself, and that architecture can also be a space made of air and light. The claim rejected the conventional view of the discipline and pushed it toward wider questions. Architecture, they argued, could also be a product of industrial, automated manufacturing. Fifty years on, today's prefabricated modular construction and 3D-printed buildings are turning that "utopia" into fact.

The Italian architect and critic Gabriele Mastrigli has studied Superstudio for more than a decade. He worked at the same university as Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, one of the group's founders, and it was their everyday conversations that sparked his interest. He also noticed that although plenty of events had taken up Superstudio over the past 20 years, none had shown its history "completely and accurately."

In 2016, Mastrigli curated "Superstudio 50 Years" at MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome, an attempt to retrace the group's work from its founding and take stock of 50 years of influence. Recently this semi-autobiographical show arrived at the Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai, where more than 200 Superstudio works hang against broad fields of lapis-lazuli blue.

The exhibition takes as its theme "The Only Architecture Will Be Our Life," and runs from December 16 until March 11 next year. Many of Superstudio's ideas may never be built, Mastrigli says, and that doesn't matter. Discussing and revisiting them today is still necessary, because they pushed people to think — "architecture isn't only what we took it to be; its relationship to our lives can be imagined boldly and defined again."

In the 1960s, an era when "nothing was impossible," Superstudio was born out of a tangle of events.

In the summer of 1966, Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia had just graduated from the School of Architecture at the University of Florence. That year the Arno swallowed the whole city like a beast, drowning galleries, schools, and libraries, and leaving young people who were already unsure about the future thoroughly disillusioned.

The first moon landing, the anti-war movement, Woodstock, the hippies, environmentalism, feminism... Anger at the present mixed with confusion about the future, and voices calling for personal freedom, revolt, and revolution filled the country. Italy's economy, meanwhile, was still climbing out of the Second World War, and the young found it hard to make new openings for themselves. Even staying on to teach at a university was close to impossible: faculty under 70 were rare in the schools of that period, and young students were locked outside. After the flood, with everything waiting to be rebuilt, foreign capital and newcomers poured into the city.

The mood was fairly optimistic. At the same time, the flood set young people thinking about a society run by consumerism. A month after the disaster, Superstudio and Archizoom staged an exhibition called "Super Architecture" in Pistoia, Italy. Both groups were founded at that show, and Superstudio took its name from it.

The "Super Architecture" they proposed called for looking at architecture again, as a cultural instrument for criticizing politics and society. "Super Architecture is the architecture of super production and super consumption, of the super inducement of supermarkets, supermen, and super gasoline consumption."

Archizoom and Superstudio made many strange objects. They never specified what the things were for, which let them build all sorts of spatial moods.

Entrepreneurs such as Sergio Camilli, an executive at Poltronova, noticed the work, and many of the pieces on show later went into furniture production, among them the Nautilus and Passiflora table lamps and the "Sofa" foam armchair. They kept their edge against the daily rituals of the rich — the same edge that runs through the photographs Superstudio made.

Superstudio understood that architecture cannot solve problems, so instead of offering concrete solutions they used architecture to examine the problems.

After the group formed, collage became its main way of attacking society and material reality. They would cut a piece out of a real photograph and paste it next to something that appeared to have no connection to it, making images that were seamless and absurd at once.

Histograms of Architecture and The Continuous Monument, both from 1969, are the two most representative Superstudio works.

Working from the grid as their basic element, they believed these pure, rational squares could produce "a single continuous atmosphere." Wooden cubes covered in white plastic sheeting, silk-screened with a 3 x 3 centimeter grid, made the histogram bricks that were the first prototype for Histograms of Architecture. The histogram, called the "architect's tomb," fit any area and any size, and later produced a whole line of Superstudio furniture, buildings, and environments.

In the Catalogue of Villas, for instance, the grid became the basic unit of the villas. Another emblematic Superstudio piece built out of grid elements, the Quaderna table, is still made today by the furniture brand Zanotta.

The Continuous Monument laid out a set of architectural models for total urbanization. Through collage, Superstudio built an enormous grid structure stretching across the whole world; on an earth made uniform by technology, culture, and imperialism, this grid "occupied, devoured, and severed" humanity's famous historical landmarks — the Taj Mahal, Manhattan, Rome's Piazza Navona.

"In a programmed world with no use for quality, only quantity can survive," Mastrigli says — which is exactly what The Continuous Monument set out to say. Superstudio conceived it for the 1969 Graz Biennale, whose theme that year was "Architecture and Freedom." It mocked the notion that architecture could change the world, in scenes that might have come out of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Twelve Ideal Cities, from 1971, grew out of the American science fiction of the day and the moon landing. Superstudio built an imaginary perfect city to ridicule the cheerful visions of city planners. In The Twelve Ideal Cities, First City: The 2,000-Ton City, the city runs through mountain woods and meadows, cut into rectangular grids measured in units of three miles. Each cell in the grid holds one resident; every citizen lives in identical conditions, and death is gone. But the "city" tracks the residents' brain impulses in real time through electronic analyzers, and the moment anyone shows dissatisfaction with this "perfect life," the ceiling presses down with a force of 2,000 tons until it meets the floor.

"See these red dots in the grid — that's the blood of the rebels," Mastrigli said, pointing at the collage on the wall.

With the Fundamental Acts series (1971-1973), Superstudio stopped treating architecture as a weapon against politics and reality and turned instead to anthropology and philosophy, looking again at the basic relationship between architecture and basic human behavior.

They issued a manifesto: "Architecture has never touched the great and fundamental themes of our lives — it has always stayed at the edges." Then they threw themselves into a series of films. The five chapters were Life, Education, Ceremony, Love, and Death, and the actors were Superstudio's own members and their families. In "Ceremony," the one chapter they managed to finish, a bearded hippie in nothing but his underwear climbs out of an underground concrete bunker, followed by another man with wild hair, then a long-haired woman naked from the waist up, one after another...

A voiceover tells us the secret of that concrete bunker: "Behind them lies an indescribably vast home, holding every kind of furniture the modern home-furnishing market offers, classical or modern in style, where everyone lives together and forms a happy, harmonious whole."

In 1973, Superstudio mounted its first touring show, Fragments from a Personal Museum, which also marked the formal end of its golden years.

Superstudio then joined Global Tools, an experimental teaching program. Adolfo Natalini, one of the founders, began teaching in the architecture department of the University of Florence and turned to Material Culture of the Suburbs. From then on the members drifted apart.

In 1978, Superstudio held a solo show at the National Institute of Architecture in Rome and was invited to the 38th Venice Biennale, joining the first large retrospective of "radical architecture," where it showed its last two new works — Lot's Wife and Zeno's Conscience.

Soon after, Superstudio announced that it was disbanding, and its members went back to their own work.

In 2003, New York staged Superstudio: Life Without Objects, an ambitious retrospective of the firm's conceptual work from 1966 to 1978.

Co-curator William Menking said, "I once asked them (Superstudio), 'Why were you born in Florence?' They asked me back, 'Why did the Renaissance happen in Florence?'"

Today the final break-up of this architecture group, which lasted 12 years, is read as "an unavoidable necessity."

Manfredo Tafuri, a theorist at the University of Venice, argued in an essay titled Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development that because architecture is a commodity, the practice of the modernist avant-garde can never get past the basic logic of capital, and so that practice is bound to fail.

The radical movement of 50 years ago reached far, yet Italians have forgotten Superstudio. Italian architecture circles today see the group as nothing more than hippies, Mastrigli told QDaily in an interview, and have forgotten where its real influence lies.

Koolhaas may be the master architect Superstudio marked most deeply. While studying at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London, he organized a lecture by Superstudio co-founder Adolfo Natalini, and his 1972 graduation project, "Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture," shows that influence directly.

Koolhaas and his young tutor Elia Zenghelis imagined a "dystopian" scheme: London split by a Berlin Wall into a good half and a bad half, with residents of the "bad" side starting to flee toward the good one. In the end the refugees became, in effect, voluntary prisoners of the "good" side's architecture. With it, Koolhaas and Zenghelis mocked the belief that architecture can only change human life for the better — it can also become, like the Berlin Wall, a tool for segregation and for crushing freedom.

In method and in argument alike, the scheme descends directly from Superstudio's The Continuous Monument: New York Extrusion (1969). There, a giant rectangular block pierces and smothers Manhattan, exposing the limits and the absurdity of the premise that "architecture can change the world."

Mastrigli explains Superstudio's 12 years this way: what outsiders saw as adolescent rebellion was, for the members, closer to a course of training. "Their task was finished, so they disbanded."

Every one of them found an answer in those years. They learned how to become architects, and then took their separate roads.

Images courtesy of the Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai