"Founded in Florence in 1967 and composed of Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo, Roberto Magris, Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris (and Alessandro Poli from 1970 to 1972), the group, which continued to be active until 1978, carried out theoretic research into design, worked in the field of architecture with exhibitions and constructions, and was active in the field of design with furniture and domestic objects.
In 1970 SUPERSTUDIO, in collaboration with the 9999 group, managed S-SPACE, the Scuola Separata per l'Architettura Concettuale Espansa. From 1971 to 1973 the group produced didactic films and utopian projects on 'fundamental' acts, seeking a philosophical and anthropological rethinking of architecture.
These included Supersurface, a series of films in the form of brief advertisements that proposed a life free of the objects presented in the 1972 exhIbition “Italy: the New Domestic Landscape” at the MoMA of New York. In 1971, the group's Monumento Continuo allowed the intuition of the Istogrammi d'architettura (1969) to take concrete shape; this consisted of a system for the abstract design of 'neutral and available entities', which brought to fulfilment the anti-design approach that had begun with the design of evasion taking a stand against the design of invention.
With their Istogrammi, Superstudio took distance from the word of design and proposed instead a 'behavioral scheme' to be applied in different areas and on differing scales, iust as their Monumento had developed an 'architectonic model of total urbanisation' in which architecture was used in a metaphorical sense as a means for extreme criticism.
The negative utopias of their Dodici Città Ideali (1971), used as 'mental reactives', and the thetorical expedients in Cinque storie del Superstudio: vita, educazione, cerimonia, amore, morte (1973) expressed a critical-educational approach. Their exhibition Superstudio: Fragmente aus einem persónlinchen Museum toured Europe in 1973-74, while the Sottsass & Superstudio: Mindscapes exhibition was presented in the United States in 1973-75.
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