This project was Superstudio’s response to the alarmist and conservative arguments to do with the preservation of Italian cities and towns. The group advocated a new approach, based on a “wholesome destruction”. Faced with this “inundation of history, a river contaminated in a tide of wastewater”, Superstudio played the card involving a “radical burial” of dogmas of the past. So the various disasters which shook Italy at that time—the cholera epidemic in Naples and the floods in Florence and Venice in 1966 (the year of the inaugural exhibition of the Superstudio and Archizoom groups)—became symbolic opportunities, founding a new urban condition. Superstudio’s proposals for the historic centres of Rome, Pisa, Florence, Milan, Naples, and Venice thus set in motion that extinction of history and the advent of a post-historical environment built on the ruins of the city, “that house filled with antique dust, distorted memories and meaningless words”.
Aurélien Vernant
