Kurzbeschreibung
This catalog accompanies the Pratt Institute's Fall 2003 exhibit highlighting the contemporary architectural work of five Italian architects collectively working as the avant-garde design group Superstudio.<BR>
Synopsis
At the heart of the avant garde in architecture and design during the late 1960s and 1970s, the radical Italian design group Superstudio is equally influential today. Founded in Florence in 1966, Superstudio challenged the modernist orthodoxy that architecture and technological advances could improve the world by creating alternative visions of the future with photo-montages, sketches, collages and films. Equally pessimistic about politics, the five members of Superstudio (Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris and Adolfo Natalini) questioned modernism's ability to solve mounting social, cultural and environmental problems. This exhibition catalogue, drawn from Superstudio's archive and curated in collaboration with members of the group, will revisit its work and trace its influence on subsequent generations of architects, from the Memphis collective in mid-1980s Italy, to Rem Koolhaas and Foreign Office Architects today. Superstudio: A Life without Objects collects around 200 of the group's most important images, collages, storyboards and critical writings.
White monuments crossing over entire landscapes and cities, vast grid groundplanes spreading over infinite beaches populated by wandering hippies: these are some of the more evocative images that consolidated their fame as vanguard architects in 1972, when MOMA invited them to participate in one of the largest exhibitions in its history, built around Italian design and architecture. With essays from Peter Lang and William Menking, the book is designed to provide the reader with the most detailed account of the group to be published since a Japanese anthology in 1982, now long out of print.