[James Bridle being all super-smart and stuff. -egg]
I first encountered Superstudio at the Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm a few years ago, in a recreation of the seminal “New Domestic Architecture” show held at MoMA in 1972. Superstudio were a radical architectural practice who operated in Italy in the late 60s and 70s, proposing a series of vast, impossible conceptual interventions – a rejection of architecture’s decorative concerns in favour of a total architecture, a “total urbanization”, best characterised by the extensive sketches and models for the “Continuous Monument”.
Beginning in 1969, the Continuous Monument proposed a gridded structure which would eventually come to encompass the entire earth, a seamless surface laid over everything, a place of nomadism and possibility and an eversion of the domestic into the public. Long heralded as forerunners of architects-of-scale such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, they have also always seemed to me to be prefiguring the network: a world-scale communication system on and within which we all dwell now. The photocollages, which I have been somewhat obsessively reproducing in Google Earth, also seem to point towards a land art for the internet, of which I have written previously.