#utopianarchitecture

Superstudio (1969) |  Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanization

Founded 1966 in Florence, Italy, Superstudio, a group of radical architects, proposed a gridded superstructure that would encircle the world. Il Monumento Continuo would eventually cover the entire surface of the planet, leaving the Earth as featureless as the smoothest desert, or, more precisely as a recklessly rough western suburb.

This exaggeration commented on the way globalisation was flooding the world after World War II. The bigger message referred to the way the world was developing at the time: turning into one anonymous megastructure, with local cultures stripped away.

In the past decades progressive architects and town planers have luckily moved away from a universal thinking in megastructures towards green architecture and concepts that engage with the local community and the environment. Green architecture is the practice of designing and using processes that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building’s life-cycle.

Superstudio | Quaderna Furniture (1969) 

“Signs ... ‘win more people to independence than will battles’.” (Auslander 227)

“Architecture was understood as a means of public education; buildings and monuments were to promote virtue.Their materiality and scale were understood to give them particular powers. “ (233)