The project is for a large machine-like exhibition building inserted in the ancient Florentine fortress. The building was intended to be used for exhibitions and a place for permanent activities. The architecture derives from industrial processes and is an early example of the High Tech movement that was developing at the time. The style also looks back to the cult of the machine found in the Italian Futurist movement of the early twentieth century, and especially Sant’Elia’s unbuilt designs for Città Nuova.

Superstudio was an architectural practice founded in 1966 by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia in Florence, where they had studied architecture together at university. They were soon joined by Alessandro and Roberto Magris and Piero Frassinelli. Superstudio quickly became one of the most prominent avantgarde groups in architecture to emerge in the 1960s, alongside for example the British group Archigram. Superstudio’s work was characteristically utopian, futuristic and anti-establishment. One of their most famous series was entitled ‘The Continuous Monument’ of 1969 in which they explored through drawing, mainly photocollage, the idea of a gridded superstructure encircling the world, a superhighway in the clouds, cutting across international borders (the majority of these collages are in MOMA, New York). Even after dissolution in 1977, Superstudio’s influence and appeal persisted, and many prominent architects acknowledge their influence.

There are seven drawings in the V&A set for this project.

Lit: Gianni Pettena, ed., Superstudio, 1966-1982: storie, figure, architettura. Florence: Electa, 1982