Superstudio, Life After Architecture

Between 1966 and 1978, Superstudio, one of the most influential groups of Italian architects of its generation, profoundly renewed the language and imagination of architecture, opening up the discipline to conceptual practices and anticipating, through photomontage, the advent of networked urban planning and total communication.

Founded in Florence in 1966 by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, and subsequently joined by Gian Piero Frassinelli, Roberto and Alessandro Magris and Alessandro Poli, Superstudio's projects have become iconic on the global radical scene.

While Histograms (1969) and The Continuous Monument (1969) ironise the failure of functionalist architecture by reducing architecture and design to a form of "absolute neutrality", Superstudio advocates a return to the fundamental Acts - Death, Love, Ceremony, Education and Life - to conceive of the city and the home as a permanent rite: "All architecture on earth is a building for an unknown ceremony".

The book follows the group's conceptual pathways in order to show both the chronology of its work and the intellectual transversality that enables us to grasp the impact of this thinking on the foundations of architecture. It also provides an exhaustive presentation of the fictional forms of writing about architecture, and a catalogue raisonné of the group's works.