Superstudio: Life after architecture

“Architecture never touches the great themes, the fundamental themes of our lives. Architecture remains at the edge of our life, and intervenes only at a certain point in the process, usually when behavior has already been codified, furnishing answers to rigidly stated problems. (…) It then becomes an act of coherence, or a last try at salvation, to concentrate on the re-definition of the primary acts, and to examine, in the first instance, the relationships between architecture and these acts..” -Superstudio, 1972

Life after Architecture is the first major exhibition in France dedicated to the work of this Italian group. The exhibition will present the most significant artworks over the entire floor area of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire. 

Founded in 1966 in Florence by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, who were later joined by Gian Piero Frassinelli (in 1968), Roberto and Alessandro Magris, as well as Andrea Poli (between 1970 and 1972), Superstudio was one of the most influential architectural groups of the European avant-gardist scene in the 1960-1970s. 

The chapters of the exhibition follow the group’s conceptual pathways to present both the chronology of the work and an intellectual multidisciplinarity, in order to understand the impact of these ideas on the fundaments of architecture. The exhibition presents the fictional forms of writing of the architecture in an exhaustive manner: sometimes by convoking founding myths (the fundamental acts: Death, Love, Ceremony, Education, and Life) while at other times proclaiming the death of architecture (the Istogrammi or the Monumento Continuo). The discipline is about writing: that of “Our lives [which] will be our only architecture.” From room to room, the work of Superstudio will invite us to experience a poetics of wandering that we are delighted to embrace at the Frac Centre-Val de Loire.

But it will also be a question of discovering the repeated attempts to influence the profession of architect and the typologies of construction directly, through the presentation—for the first time—of catalogues of villas and the production of new models in collaboration with the group’s members.

In order to bring the conceptual importance of Superstudio up to date, an entire floor has been dedicated to radical architecture, based on the Frac Centre-Val de Loire Collection. This dialogue will be historically contextualised on the one hand, while also posing self-reflexive questions that will reveal the importance of Superstudio on the contemporary architectural scene.

Curators:
Abdelkader Damani (director of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire) 
Luca Galofaro (architect)

Contact communication: Frac Centre-Val de Loire: Marine Bichon, marine.bichon@frac-centre.fr