SUPERSTUDIO - CONTINUOUS MONUMENT
Some 30 years ago, Superstudio, a group of radical Florentine architects, proposed a gridded superstructure that would wrap around the world. Eventually, this structure, Il Monumento Continuo, would cover the entire surface of the planet, leaving the Earth as featureless as the smoothest desert, or, more to the point, as a wilfully low-brow, suburban-style western city.
The point was exaggerated but well made: Superstudio were commenting on the way globalisation was swamping the world. Given the way the world was developing, we might as well all live in one anonymous megastructure, with local cultures stripped away.
Superstudio's continuous monument seems as relevant today as it did when first unveiled in a sequence of clever photo-collages in 1969.
Unlike Archigram, the British pop architecture group who saw new technology, when applied with wit, as a positive way into a hedonistic future, Superstudio saw 1960s technologia as a malevolent force. Although radicals rather than conservatives, they turned their back on the burgeoning conservation movement, too.
Jonathan Glancey › The Guardian, 2003
Superstudio's Continuous Monument, developed in a series of collages and storyboards in 1969, is a vision of total urbanisation. There is nature and then there is the city, a single giant structure stretching across the landscape. The city's form is determined by a geometric accumulation of white cuONbes - and if cities can be achieved simply by multiplying these basic components then there is no need any more for architects.
What Superstudio are offering is a spurious utopia designed to make one reflect on how the world could look if the then accepted norms of design and urban planning progressed unchecked.
Their idea of a single design anticipates to some extent the cultural uniformity of globalisation and is also a pseudo-practical approach to a world of sprawling cities.
Justin McGuirk › IconEye, 2003