Artistic processes for the foundation of a “new architecture”, 1951-69
(2026)
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- (en) The dissertation reconstructs the origins of the “new architecture” that took shape between 1951 and 1969, a period in which the post-war generation of architects in Europe and the United States sought to refound the discipline through artistic processes. Emerging against the backdrop of a political, social, and cultural crisis, this generation identified in architecture a field of experimentation capable of absorbing impulses from a particular form of art that drew on mass culture, new technologies, and the transformed rhythms of everyday life. The study retraced the genealogy of this shift through two decisive experiences: the founding of "Archigram" in the United Kingdom (1961) and that of Superstudio in Italy (1966). Although situated in different contexts, both articulated a refoundation of architecture through the “inter-arts”, understood as the integration of artistic concepts, technological languages, and mass-media imagery. In London, this direction led to the foundation of "Archigram", a publication that operated as an experimental laboratory on paper; in Florence, it gave rise to Superstudio, whose work — beginning with the "Superarchitettura" exhibition — asserted a collective authorship and expanded architecture into a conceptual field. Tracing this genealogy required extending the analysis back to 1945, when culture, art, and architecture became political instruments in the reconstruction of the United Kingdom and Italy. The "Festival of Britain" (1951) crystallised a new cultural climate in the United Kingdom, while in Italy the Communist Party’s promotion of “figuration” shaped the artistic debate. Within these frameworks, the dissertation examined the formative years, early projects, and initial references of the figures who constituted the original core of both "Archigram" and Superstudio: Peter Cook, David Greene, and Michael Webb — the authors of the first issue of "Archigram" — as well as Adolfo Natalini, founder of Superstudio, who in the years preceding the group’s formation had been actively engaged in artistic practice. For Cook, Greene, and Webb, the Independent Group played a central role through exhibitions such as "Growth and Form" (1951), "Parallel of Life and Art" (1953), and "This Is Tomorrow" (1956), which introduced the notion of “inter-arts” by bringing together technology, mechanisation, and mass-media imagery. These concepts underpinned the first four issues of "Archigram" (1961–64) and informed the emergence of a “new generation” that conceived architecture as a consumable product, embraced “expendability”, and reached its most complete formulation in Cook’s Plug-in City (1964). For Superstudio, extensive research in Natalini’s private archives and a series of interviews made it possible to reconstruct his artistic activity between 1954 and 1965. Through painting, exhibitions, travels between Florence and London, and encounters with the works of Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Eduardo Paolozzi, Robert Rauschenberg, and Gruppo 70, among others, Natalini developed a conception of the work as “habitable” art (Natalini, 1963), the title of a painting from 1963 that preceded the exhibition "Arte abitabile" by Michelangelo Pistoletto, Piero Gilardi and Gianni Piacentino (Galleria Sperone, Turin, 1966). This notion, which extended the limits of the canvas and opened up new possibilities for architecture, emerged in his early works and student projects (1962–1966) before converging in the first projects of Superstudio (1966–1969). The “Monumento Continuo” represented the culmination of this trajectory — a sequence of photomontages that transformed architecture into a form of “Land Art” and situated the group within an expanded “interartisticity”. “Inter-arts” and “interartisticity” are crucial to the dissertation in articulating this new relationship between art and architecture — one that exceeded Le Corbusier’s “synthesis of the arts” and Gio Ponti’s triad of architecture, painting, and sculpture. A conceptual field, later described by Natalini as a “no man’s land”, became the shared ground on which the so-called Archigram group and Superstudio laid the foundations of a “new architecture” derived from artistic processes. Over time, this “no man’s land” expanded into an inter-landscape, revealing the extent to which the artistic foundations of their work reshaped the expressive possibilities of the discipline.
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Felicori, B. (2026). Artistic processes for the foundation of a “new architecture”, 1951-69. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/278723