For a brief period in the late 1960s, the future of architecture was located in Florence. The Renaissance city was home to some of the most radical architectural collectives in the world, bearing futuristic names such as Superstudio and Zziggurat, Archizoom and UFO. None of them had clients, which was probably for the best. While each boasted a distinctive style and original ideas, the structures proposed in their most interesting plans were essentially uninhabitable. In the words of Archizoom co-founder Andrea Branzi, they were designing critical utopias: ideal cities that made fun of their own idealism.
After half a century, the Tuscan architects' ironic urban planning is back, on view at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and also documented in an important book published by Quodlibet. Seen in a contemporary context, their schemes are remarkably prescient. The young radicals anticipated many of the excesses that have only grown more excessive, and showed how to see through the hype.
No-Stop City, the signature project of Archizoom, is a case in point. Designed with the goal of "freeing mankind from architecture insomuch as it is a formal structure", their proposed metropolis is endlessly expansive and perfectly featureless. The urban landscape is barren except for the repetition of artificial air-conditioned environments as anonymous as the big boxes of an industrial park. People are at liberty to live as they wish and wherever they want, but the individual freedom comes at the expense of community. Archizoom channels what many would envision as paradise, only to evoke an emptiness within the plenty.
Superstudio approached the problem of urban planning from the opposite direction. Instead of striving to create a "city without qualities", the Superstudio architects took up the defining quality of Modernism and applied it mercilessly in an "architectural model for total urbanization". Comprised of uniform blocks assembled in globe-spanning superstructures, the collective's Continuous Monument is an exaggeration of Modernist excess that presents the total implementation of the predominant architectural paradigm.
However Superstudio also suggested an alternative application of the grid. Their Supersurface almost imperceptibly encompasses the world to provide points of connection for a post-architectural nomadic existence. At the level of infrastructure, it's a premonition of the Internet today. At the level of social structure, it may be a fair prediction of augmented reality tomorrow or next year.
Superstudio shrewdly left open the question of whether this material vacuum is more or less utopian than the concrete maximalism of the Continuous Monument. And while Superstudio exhibited with Archizoom, the relative merits of the collectives' diverse visions were largely left for viewers to judge. The ultimate critics of these critical utopias were – and still are – the spectators.
By materializing people's dreams, and forcing the public to confront them as architectural plans and models, the Tuscan radicals made people consider what they really wanted. For a brief period in the late 1960s, the architectural collectives of Florence vicariously built the future.
