In 1965, Le Corbusier drowned whilst swimming in the French Riviera. On November 5th the following year, the city of Florence was drowned when the River Arno flooded. Modernism was dying, architecture was gasping, and while the flood of 1966 was a catastrophe for the city, for others it proved liberating–a catalyst for radicals who registered an opportunity for change in the river’s bloated mass. In the city’s central libraries, the tight fist of history loosened its grip as books became swollen and distorted, pages freed from their blocks rearranged themselves, fixing themselves to walls and ceilings in a mapping of chaotic knowledge and time. In Piazza Santa Croce, the imposing marble statue of Dante stood marooned in a swirl of rogue cars and debris as the water lapped his feet. Over in the state archives, birth, marriage, and death certificates, police records, and administrative documents were liquified. Whole lifetimes reconsolidated with the water from which they came, records turned into soft-bodied cephalopods bleeding smokescreens of black ink as they made their escape. 

It was 5 PM by the time the water reached the studio of Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, who had spent the day working on the first Superstudio Manifesto, blissfully unaware of what was unfolding outside. Envisioned along with his classmate Adolfo Natalini, and later joined by Alessandro and Roberto Magris and Piero Frassinelli, Superstudio was an avante-garde architecture collective united by a shared disillusionment with modernist orthodoxies. The group wanted to expand the definition of what architecture could be, or, according to Natalini, “show that design and architecture could be philosophical, theoretical activities and provoke a new consciousness.” From their very first show, that’s exactly what they did. 

Opening in December, 1966, exhibition Superarchitettura helped to establish the city as a hotbed for the avant-garde. In collaboration with fellow Florentine collective Archizoom, Superstudio tapped into the frustrations of the city’s young creatives, already radicalised by rapid social, economic, and now environmental upheaval. “Superarchitecture,” they claimed, in what would become their signature parodic voice, “is the architecture of superproduction, of superconsumption, of superinduction to superconsumption, of the supermarket, of superman and super petrol.” The show, which took place at Jolly 2 Gallery in Pistoia, was a riot of pop-flavoured pomp with abstract seating and sculptural lamps that acted as hybrids between architecture and furniture. It was also an act of willful disregard for the Modernist axiom of “form follows function.” In the years to come, the group rarely participated in built architecture, instead using drawings, collage, film, and furniture to put forth psychedelic proposals that questioned the very nature of design, a kind of anti-architecture taking its cues from American sci-fi novels and the political shake-up of the 1960s. 

In their bizarre drifts through fiction and fantasy, Superstudio cautioned against futures of bland global uniformity, imagining a white gridded, monolithic structure that would span the entire world. Just as the flood had transformed Florence into a liquified surface from which the city’s domes and spires emerged, The Continuous Monument, their manifesto-like project from 1969, is a featureless horizon that hopes for a “cosmic order on earth,” a sweeping architectural default with the clinical infinity of a reset button. Born from natural disaster, the group’s output often functioned this way–as a warning against rampant development, aesthetic entropy, and progress left unchecked. Their other work conceived of twelve visions of dystopia, transforming New York into a giant cube where ten million conscious human brains float through the city in liquid containers, or speculating on futures spent on spinning wheels in outer-space. 

Foregoing any ideological allegiance, it wasn’t just Modernism’s rigid definition of progress that Superstudio lamented. They also took aim at the embalming impulse of conservationists, and demonstrated, ironically, that what they each amounted to was largely the same; knee-jerk tenets of exhaustion, unable to imagine new vistas for the future. In their 1972 project, Salvataggi di centri storici italiani (Italia vostra), the group outlined a series of single-stroke “rescue” strategies for Italian cities, mimicking the timidity of imagination they perceived in prominent preservation groups like Italia Nostra. With deadpan simplicity and surprisingly plausible particularities, they proposed plans to drain the canals of Venice, bury Rome under an archaeological mound, transform Naples into a theme park, tilt everything in Pisa, encase Milan, and controversially, flood Florence. In Superstudio’s subaquatic Florence, one enters the city through water-level bell towers and belfries, free to visit a handful of newly waterproofed historical buildings. 

Their collages show the horizon of the city as a vast glassy surface of water, punctuated only by the tip of Brunelleschi’s bare-boned dome and a handful of sailing boats lapping up the sights. When does the impulse to preserve history become paralysing, they asked, and how far back are we willing to go? “If you really want to restore the situation,” Natalini noted, “why just restore it to the 19th century? Why not restore the Renaissance situation? If you do that, why not the Medieval situation? In fact, why don’t you go back to the Roman situation? And if you go back that far, why don’t you go back to the Pleistocene situation?” Reclining further and further into the past, Superstudio’s Florence stretched the logic of preservation to its limits, taking the city back to the Quaternary age, when the region would have been occupied by a great lake. 

It’s fun to imagine the Uffizi as a giant ship, or dividing the city into one hundred micro-zones, one for each of Dante’s cantos. Though, having rightly predicted the creeping sameness that’s come to haunt many of today’s urban landscapes, perhaps in the end, they would have preferred the city just as it is; timeless, abundant, resilient. The ideal city, you could say, from which to denounce the absurdities of the modern world. And let’s face it, where else could have birthed a group like Superstudio? Renaissance men in the true sense of the word, not just architects, but artists, anarchists, activists. In Florence, that’s simply called tradition.