Chapter 1 of 24
Adolfo Natalini
I started working in Florence with a group of friends called Superstudio in 1966, which is the same year in which Florence has been flooded. Since then, we have been working in various fields like industrial design, architectural design, and let's say architectural theories. Our first work was supposed to be a sort of architectural criticism using projects instead of words and essays. In fact we tried to produce a sort of 3D criticism. Many of the first projects, which now can be labelled as ‘Utopian projects’ and now are regarded as part of an Italian avant garde movement of the 'architettura radicale' - which means something like 'radical architecture' - were not meant to be utopian at all. But, on the contrary, they were using some rhetorical devices as negative utopias using 'demonstration per absurdum' or logical extrapolation. That is, we tried to push every idea to its extreme consequences in order to demonstrate the falsity and immorality of its starting point.