Transverse, metaphysical, indefinable, ever-new, ever outré... All these words can be used to describe Superstudio, although no fixed label can accurately define it and its members. For its entire career, the legendary architecture group from Italy never finished an actual building, yet its influences and impacts remain in multiple present-day disciplines including architecture, design, art and philosophy, making Superstudio a living legend in the post-war design history.

Superstudio was founded in 1966 by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di France, who were both students of architecture at the University of Florence. The duo were later joined by Gian Piero Frassinelli and the brothers Roberto and Alessandro Magris from 1967 to 1970, with Alessandro Poli an associate between 1970 and 1972.

In December 1966, Superstudio, together with Archizoom, a design studio also from Florence, jointly held an exhibition titled Superarchitettura at the Jolly 2 art gallery in Pistoia. Serving as Superstudio’s motif, “superarchitecture is to the architecture of superproduction, of superconsumption, super induction to consumption, of supermarkets, superman and super gas.”The exhibition directly negated functional modernism, and, in many eye’s, vigorously pushed forward Italy’s Radical design movement.

In the next few years, Superstudio gradually embraced design works that were most representative to its career, and encompassed developments and transitions that related to its theoretical diversification. Using simple yet abstract geometric patterns, A Journey into the Realm of Reason (1969) summarized the architecture group’s vision from 1965 to 1968, during which it firmly claimed that “architecture was a means of changing the world”.

In Histograms of Architecture of the same year (1969-70), Superstudio prepared a catalogue of non-continuous three-dimensional diagrams, with reference to a grid that could be carried over to different areas or scales, projecting its attention to the topic of architectural scale in which architecture became abstract designs of substantial forms.

In its best known project The Continuous Monument series (1969), the group proposed that vast, gridded mega structures would stretch across world capitals and pristine natural landscapes — spanning the earth, even into outer space. Among the most famous images is a striking view of Lower Manhattan enveloped by a horizontal monolith. As Superstudio considers architecture “one of the few ways to affirm humanity's capacity for acting according to reason”, the series proposed negative utopian concepts, rhetorical means to demonstrate ad absurdum the possibilities and limits of architecture as a critique to modern society.

The group’s The Twelve Ideal Cities (1971) revealed obvious inspirations and influences from American sci-fi novels as well as moon-landings of the time, and applied metaphors to cohesive power mechanisms and modern machines.

Starting in 1972, Superstudio worked to produce a series of films focused on the Fundamental Acts, through which the group declared: “Architecture never touches the great themes, the fundamental themes of our lives; architecture remains at the limit.” As chapters that look at life, education, ceremony, love and death, these films were an ambitious attempt to confront the relationship between life and project, proposing a radical anthropological and philosophical refoundation of architecture.