Monumento Continuo, Superstudio
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“Finally,” continued Natalini, “we started designing negative utopias like Il Monumento Continuo,”—the grid scaled up to the dimensions of the globe—“images warning of the horrors architecture had in store with its scientific methods for perpetuating standard models worldwide.” Mixing Modernist techniques of photomontage with good old-fashioned linear perspective (as developed in the 1400s by Brunelleschi in Superstudio’s hometown of Florence), the scarily compelling Continuous Monument images were produced at a time when venerable old cities like Genoa were being scarred by highway viaducts driven bang through their centers in the name of “progress” and the unstoppable circulation of goods and capital. But The Continuous Monument was profoundly ambiguous: looking back to historical archetypes such as the Great Wall of China, the Pont du Gard and ancient-Egyptian mastabas, it was as mute, mysterious and pseudo-mythological as the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (which had just been released), at once a very practical answer to the ghastly uniform sprawl that was blighting cities across the world—instead of endless suburbia, why not tidy everything away into a continuous linear building that demarcates a clear divide between countryside and nature?—and a distillation and sublimation of the very same bland uniformity it purported to counter.
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Crediamo in un futuro di architettura ritrovata, in un futuro in cui l’architettura riprenda i suoi pieni poteri abbandonando ogni sua ambigua designazione e ponendosi come unica alternativa alla natura. Nel binomio natura naturans e natura naturata scegliamo il secondo termine. Eliminando miraggi e fate morgane di architetture spontanee, architetture della sensibilità, architetture senza architetti, architetture biologiche e fantastiche, ci dirigiamo verso il «monumento continuo»: un’architettura tutta egualmente emergente in un unico ambiente continuo: la terra resa omogenea dalla tecnica, dalla cultura e da tutti gli altri imperialismi. ( 1969 )
