Toward an Architecture of Distribution: Superstudio's Magazine Works

FAIN: FT-58625-11

Ross Elfline
Carleton College (Northfield, MN 55057-4001)

I am applying for a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend to fund a research trip to Paris, France and Florence and Filottrano, Italy in the summer of 2011. The purpose of this trip is to examine the photomontages of the Italian Radical Architecture collective Superstudio (active 1966-80) with the ultimate goal of authoring an essay to be published in a journal of art and/or architectural history. From 1969 to 1974 Superstudio published a series of drawings and photomontages depicting their fantastical designs for hypothetical megastructures that extended modernist design principles in a hyperbolic fashion. By considering both the pop cultural source material and the mass-produced nature of the finished magazine works, I investigate the implications of deploying this inherently multiple and itinerant medium in the name of architecture, thus reinventing the discipline for a new, media-savvy age.