The Artificial Panoramas of Superstudio

Abstract

This paper examines the visual and conceptual language of the radical Italian architecture collective Superstudio, focusing on their contribution to MoMA's 1972 Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition, Supersurface: An Alternative Model for Life on Earth. Taking Superstudio's own concept of an "image-guide" as its methodological cue, the paper traces the visual genealogy of the group's signature iconography — the reflective grid, the supersurface, the nomadic figure in open landscape — through the broader Italian artistic milieu of Arte Povera, the theoretical tradition of landscape painting, and the semiotic concept of the surface as skin. It argues that Superstudio's "domestic landscape" constitutes a rhetorically composite proposition: simultaneously ironic and utopian, pastoral and technological, urban and anti-urban. Reading their work through Isabelle Stengers' critique of the Anthropocene, the paper concludes that Superstudio's image-guide articulates not an inevitable total urbanisation but an anachronistic resistance to it — a habitation without labour, framed by the uninhabitable.