(Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Adolfo Natalini, Alessandro Poli, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia), 1971, collage of clippings from photographs and magazines, red paper strips, dried moss, on cardboard, 39.3 x 27.3 cm, cardboard support 43.5 x 31.3 cm. Old mount on paper, together with a photograph of the cover design for “Rassegna”, inscribed in ink: DA „LIFE: SUPERSURFACE“ (VITA) SUPERSTUDIO 1971. (DRAX)

Lit.:
Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Achievments and Problems of Italian Design, New York 1972, pp. 240-251, fig. p. 251 - Rassegna modi di abitare oggi, March/April 1972, year 5, no. 21, cover and pp. 18–21, ill. p. 19

Provenance:
family ownership after Alessandro Magris, Florence

Supersurface LIFE (or the puplic image of truly modern architecture).
Supersurface / a model of alternative life on earth.

Architecture is no longer the mediation man-environment translated into the complexification of needs, creating an artificial panorama and a „second poverty“, but becomes a crossscience.

Through the collation and the extrapolation of data and tendencies of different disciplines (from body control techniques to philosophy, from disciplines of logic, to medicine, to bionics, to geography...), a guiding image is visualized: a life no longer based on work (and the power and violence connected with it ), but on unalienated human relationships. It is the last chance for architecture to act as „planner“....
Superstudio, in: rassegna 1972

“Rassegna modi di abitare oggi” devoted a major part of its 1972 March/April issue to the visionary contributions to the exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape”, which was shown at the New York MOMA at the time. Superstudio designed the cover on the basis of a work for that show.

Superstudio began their group activity in Florence in 1966, working in the fields of architecture and interior and industrial design. Since then, they have carried on research on architectural theory and design. They imagined the planet without architecture, just as a surface for a network of energy that would replace objects by a grid. In 1972 they participated in the legendary exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” at the New York MOMA, where their model of an alternative strategy of a life without objects was presented to an international audience and received enormous feedback.

“In this exhibition, we present the model of a mental attitude. This is not a three-dimensional model of a reality that can be given concrete form by a mere transposition of scale, but a visual rendition of a critical attitude towards (or a hope for) the activity of designing, understood as philosophical speculation, as a means to knowledge, as critical existence.”
(Superstudio, in: “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape”)