A model for global urbanization, No-Stop City is a theoretical project published for the first time in Casabella magazine in 1970 under the title: “City, assembly line of social issues, ideology and theory of the metropolis.” It implemented “the idea of the disappearance of architecture within the metropolis.” For Andrea Branzi, No-Stop City is a critical utopia founded on a realistic vision of the world, where design is intended to be the fundamental conceptual tool for modifying lifestyles and territory. This “endless city” has the same type of organization as a factory or a supermarket. It offers a repetitive pattern with multiple hubs, a neutral, equal and continuous structure. No-Stop City looks like a sort of car park furbished with inhabitable furniture, objects that can be utilized according to circumstance. It is a place where individuals can build their dwelling space through their own free and personal involvement. Interior spaces, equipped with artificial lighting and air conditioning, enable inhabitants to set up new dwelling typologies that are open and continuous, and therefore likely to foster new ways of association and forms of community. “To qualitative utopias, we answer with the only possible utopia: the one of Quantity” (Andrea Branzi). No-Stop City is a radical analysis of the architecture project and of design, offering a model for an immaterial city without quality, a city dedicated only to the continuous flow of information, technical networks, markets and services; where architecture disappears in a pure “urban semiosphere”, free of all symbolic value.
