” Manufatto Continuo”
What went wrong???
An anachronism future???
In a precise historical moment, at the turn of the sixties and seventies, the events and especially the common disturbances, were the principal “architectural debates; one of the major avant-garde arguments of the city and how these would have been revolutionized by the future, that it seemed easy to achieve.
In those years, they had a lot of faith towards the new technologies that promised to improve the lives of the human beings. Progress appeared unstoppable and design pushed to imagine huge cities (that was driven by a cultural ferment), rather than massive aerial structures that would have been better for the needs of the inhabitants.
In particular, Superstudio produced a series of “lucky” projects that had a considerable impact in a international level. The target of the group of young Florentine architects, was to give life to architecture “strong and neat, like the historical monuments […] with the desire to see everything in big terms, an architecture with no surprises, which remains constant and equal to itself”.
The Conitnuo monument was the first great example, it was the Manifesto of a ‘Absolute’ architecture, Supreme, Abstract, wich exceeds the classic concept of The Building, and that indeed takes full quotation from Malevich: “All that we loved is lost, we’ve almost reached the desert. In front of us there is only a black square on a white surface”.
Yet in later years and in the following projects this idea evolves, it grows and matures, going beyond the concept of the city to become the project of a new global social order, a new model the subverts the reality of life in pursuit of Utopia. It becomes critically disruptive on the history and the memory of places, ending up rejecting the Continuo monument itself, and rediscover the concept of artisan in the ‘Material culture’, simple, humble, almost an informal construction.
The rustic but especially the disillusionment towards the modernity that gave the decisive impulse, which apparently might seem a contradiction, was probably one of the last inevitable step in the evolutionary process that begun from the Continuo monument.
The discovery of the delirious of the contemporary metropolis and of the power of alienating his invisible network, is solved in the choice of Superstudio by collecting important documentation of observations and photographs of tools and farm houses. […] The huts of the subaltern cultures or the marginalized farmers, artisans, fishermen, shepherds and coal miners offer to Superstudio the exact models in opposition for alternative forms of life, for relationships not alienated.”
The failure today appears unambiguous, not the architects or perhaps not only , but an entire era and it’s values have proved to be inappropriate; the modern utopian plan for the future, to predict with a pencil it’s forms that has shown it’s limitations; the reality as thoroughly investigated is becoming more and more complex, it has difficulty to adapt to those geometries that we hired as conceptual models.
Just as the Heisenberg postulated, the effect of the quantum theory, definitely puts in crisis the dream of Laplace,a model of the universe that is completely determined and deducted. Today the reality puts an end to the utopian and the illusion oa an absolute model, certain and definitive for the future of our cities.
The only answer, in our opinion, is that the architecture should take a step back and the architect needs to acknowledge it’s limitations recognizing a certain amount of unpredictability, and in this case it should change his certainties that the human nature or the nature of the architecture slowly adapts to only possible future, which coincides with the same of the humanity.
New York has always been in the last two centuries the soil of investigation for the future, and right in between the skyscrapers, started to create it’s shape the Continuo monument of the Superstudio: but something went wrong, the pure and absolute building with the contact of the external life got contaminated, used, worn and adapted to the needs of citizens, which in turn they have exploited it to provide their counterproposal, their future, transforming it from utopia to a jar of single and individual utopias; an opportunity to give shape and support a dream of everyone that the opposite of a society now alienated and alienating respond with it’s past.
