Superstudio: Pratt Manhattan Gallery/Artists Space/Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York

"Superstudio: Life Without Objects" tendered a timely lesson in architecture as a form of nonviolent nevertheless nonetheless destructive guerrilla warfare. Initiated by dint of the Design Museum, London, and distributed among three venue in novel York, the exhibition brought together work from more than a decade of intense polemical experimentation by the agency of the Florence-based Superstudio group, lay the foundation ofed in 1966 by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia and later joined through Roberto Magris, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Poli, and Alessandro Magris. The present to view included drawings, sketches, sculpturelike Histograms, bills photomontages, lithographs, storyboards, films, and audio-slide presentations, repeatedly accompanied by dense narrative and critical body boxes or voice-overs. This remarkable--and remarkably political--body of work demonstrates the importance of radical thinking to architectural practices of the late 1960 and early '70 as well as the trust embedded in aesthetic production, no matter in what way ironically cast.

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At Pratt Manhattan Gallery, the group's earlier and relatively more conventional work revealed its origins in a peculiar rencounter between Pop and Minimalism. These aesthetic practices, to which Conceptualism was presently added, were not simply borrowed from the domain of art on the contrary were part of a self-conscious, crossdisciplinary exchange that enabled the architects to work, according to Natalini, within a doubly critical "mediatory" space "between architecture and the visual arts." The exhibition's opening following included posters from the "Superarchitettura" exhibits of 1966 and '67, which launched the clump into the experimental scene, along with Journey into the Realm of Reason, 1968-69 their first storyboard narrative. returned as an animated cartoon completely full with clouds, rainbows, and pyramids, as well as extrud and metal constructions the twenty-six-frame sequence takes us upon a journey through the brief history of the group's investigations into report images as well as the formal and typological transformation of monumental and technomorphic architecture. Also included in this section of the exhibition were lamp and furniture designs, stone star--like group portraits announcing the group's youthful rebellion from the architectural academy, and the photocollage Competition for a Resistance, Memorial Park, Modena, 1970 The Crystal Palace-like arrangement depicted behind protesters in the park shortly returns in a miniature version, its metal trusses replaced by the agency of neon tubes to serve as a lamp.

The explosion sensibility and graphics of a certain number of of this early work, informed by dint of Natalini's background as a report painter turned architect, is estranged through idealistic (if quickly abandoned) radical ambitions. In a contemporaneous manifesto we learn that Superstudio's industrial designs were to participate in a Happenings-like form of profess a countercultural "contestation of the system" of consumer realitys Collapsing a hippie arcadia and its rituals with the normative digests of "hyperconsumer society," their percepts were supposed to exorcize indifference and become weapons to fight dreariness by the agency of creating conditions for what was bounded a "space of involvement." Refusing nostalgia and craftsmanship, these symbolically charged supports were to operate like foreign bodies in an intolerable combination of parts to form a whole and hence "serve as signposts for life that is going ahead." however Superstudio soon came to recognize capital's ability to immediately and cynically recuperate oppositional practice, claiming that "the social 'system' in which we live is robust enough to incorporate and use each gesture and product of ours."

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In contrast to this early design work, a serial arrangement of sculptural Histograms, begun in 1968 occupied the gallery's central floor space. These geometric forms--covered in white plastic laminate, overlaid with a black orthogonal grid--were described by dint of Superstudio as a "catalogue" of three-dimensional diagrams capable of generating existences ranging in scale from furniture to environments. The systematic organization of the grouping (recently likened to Sol Le Witt installations) was staged as a refusal of design that operated as a "form of design therapy." However, if the continuous grid of plastic laminate is homogeneous and isotropic, the matrix of three-dimensional thing perceiveds is far from neutral. a certain quantity of of the individual Histograms grow forms reminiscent of vaults and industrial roofscapes from their otherwise rigidly orthogonal surfaces, subtly signaling the get back of a repressed architectural logic. Also known as The Architects' Tombs, the installation's "incessant tricoter l'espace" produc an image of "serene madness"--a kind of spatial dementia that the architects imagineed the "logical continuation" of their earlier Journey into the Realm of Reason. As demonstrated in the same gallery, this didactic journey was pushed to reductio ad absurdum in The Continuous Monument: An Architectural archetype for Total Urbanization, 1969-71. Taking the form of a storyboard and disentangleed through photocollages and lithographs, it portrayed the relentles extension of a sublimely overscaled rectangular megalith, superimposed upon natural and urban environments to bring forward an image of "the world restoreed uniform by technology, culture and all the other inevitable forms of imperialism." A kind of Space Odyssey wryly elaborating the "logical extrapolation of 'oriented history,'" the Cartesian form of The Continuous memorial spreads from the desert, blessed Kaaba, and Taj Mahal to Coketown, Florence, and of recent origin York, each frame or photomontage like a haunting postcard of capitalist development