November 09, 2003
Voluntary Prisoners: A Review of Superstudio: Life without Objects (2003)
by Casey Mack
With Central Park’s 26 thousand trees soon to be available as backrests for 823 acres of wireless internet, it is hard to disagree that Peter Lang and William Menking’s Superstudio: Life Without Objects (2003) is timely in the way it takes the work of this important Italian architecture group and puts it back on the table. Indeed, Superstudio’s work anticipated many organization patterns and structures in our society today. It recognized that we were entering a nomadic and mobile age in which one can “plug and play” as easily in an open meadow as in a closed apartment. It saw that the outdoors could become our new indoors.
Although many of us are familiar with Superstudio’s signature projects, the history and context of their work have remained largely mysterious. Thankfully, this book helps correct this situation. It was not the book I was hoping for (a point that I’ll get into in a moment), but it still provides useful information. Peter Lang’s piece, for example, analyzes Superstudio against the backdrop of Florence’s preservationist oligarchy, its haphazard reconstruction efforts, and its incipient Americanism after the Second World War through to the early 1970s. Meanwhile, William Menking’s essay clarifies Superstudio’s endeavors relative to other Italian practices like Joe Colombo and Archizoom included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1972 exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.
My main criticism of the book centers on the fact that it does not quite carry out what it set out to accomplish. Lang and Menking write in their introductory essay that “[w]hile this publication is not intended to become a catalogue raisonné on the works of Superstudio, it has been conceived as a work of consultation and reflection.” The book is indeed not a catalogue raisonné, but nor does it provide sufficient in-depth, critical analysis to be a work of consultation. More surprisingly still, there is a lack of images and illustrations in the book (not helped by its small format) which prevent it from being a work of reflection. For example, only six of their Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas (1971) are accompanied by their rendered views, and all unfortunately lack their beautiful analytical drawings. Many other items in the book appear without commentary or title, leaving the impression that, like religious icons, it is enough to hang Superstudio high up on the wall and be content with mute reverence.
Excessive reverence is ironically another problem I found with the book. The editors write in the introductory essay that there is “[n]o better moment […] to turn back the pages of history to that previous era when a similarly ample crisis ripped through the world economies: welcome to Italy in the 1960s, a time of boom and bust; of war and resistance; of dreams and despair.” I share in this enthusiasm, but at times it appears that this very passion leads the editors awry. Superstudio’s work is timely, but not because it represents a radical break with the past. On the contrary, in projects like Life/Supersurface Superstudio exhibits a primeval nostalgia for wholeness and unity that is quite different from the ‘negative utopia’ usually sold as the office’s main product.
I would also take issue with the subheading of the book, “Life without Objects.” This characterization suggests a reading of Superstudio that places it in league with nihilistic groups like F.T. Marinetti's Italian Futurists. But such an interpretation only tells part of the story. Admittedly, Superstudio’s co-founder Adolfo Natalini did desire “the destruction of [the object’s] attributes of ‘status’ and the connotations imposed by power.” But he also saw Superstudio's mission as one of forging peace; he articulated a vision of “Existenzmaximum” that “harmoniously” developed tools and technologies already at our disposal.
I end with an anecdote. In the recent documentary on the Cultural Revolution in China, Morning Sun, one interviewee comments that those who preach continuous revolution as Mao did in fact kill revolution. With this phenomenon in mind, we should note a perhaps surprising quality that Superstudio mentions repeatedly in this book: serenity. What the techniques and technologies of serenity actually might look like still remains to be seen.
Casey Mack is a New York-based architect and critic.
Posted by agglutinations at November 9, 2003 06:00 AM