PERCORRENDO O MONUMENTO CONTÍNUO NAS FOTOMONTAGENS DO SUPERSTUDIO

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s, during the post-World War II European economic boom, the internal issues of modern thinking in architecture were exposed and a slow process of rupture with it was triggered. This debate was intensified in the 1960s, when various groups of architects in different geographical contexts criticized modernist precepts from unprecedented approaches. One of them was the Florentine group Superstudio (1966-1978), created by Italians Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia. They, using pre-existing photographs, subverted the impersonality of modern architecture and its lack of dialogue with social reality in the form of ironic photomontages. These representations often pushed the precepts of modernism to the absurd and envisioned not an “ideal” city, but to reveal the reality suggested to European cities in that historical context and to demonstrate the limits of modern principles of architecture. The present study seeks to investigate, based on a literature review, the thinking expressed in Supestudio’s photomontages and to analyse the manner in which they contributed to the critique of the modern movement in Florence (Italy) in the 1960s. As a case study, it will be analysed one of the main productions of the group, the series of photomontages “Continuous Monument” (1969). This analysis aims at reading formal aspects and implicit messages that those images intend to transmit.