Superstudio, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Adolfo Natalini
The First City, from the Twelve Ideal Cities, project Aerial perspective
1971
Photolithograph
Not on view
Superstudio's Twelve Ideal Cities project is a wry comment on twentieth-century modernist utopias, and it supposedly represents "the supreme achievement of twenty thousand years of civilization." In the First City, or 2,000-Ton City, shown here, cubic cells stacked atop one another form a continuous building that stretches across a green, undulating landscape. Each cell is equipped with technology capable of accommodating all human desires and physiological needs. In this city, humans are in a state of equality and death no longer exists, but if an inhabitant tries to rebel against this ideal state, the ceiling of his or her cell will descend with a two-thousand-ton force, obliterating the dissenter and making way for a new perfect citizen.
75 Years of Architecture at MoMA, 2007.
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Radical Architecture
A cohort of Italian architects and designers active from the late 1960s through the 1970s. They placed themselves in opposition to the rationalism and functionalism of 20th-century modernism and formed during a tumultuous period characterized by political violence and extremism, student uprisings, and social unrest.
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