"Life after architecture" is an exhibition of Superstudio that consists of several chapters that are approached chronologically, dedicating a full floor of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire to update the conceptual importance of Superstudio.
The chapters present the fictitious forms of architecture writing in a comprehensive manner through echos, through which the members of the study presented the architecture as a story, a fiction, sometimes a ritual, but rarely a building or construction.
The chapters present the fictitious forms of architecture writing in a comprehensive manner through echos, through which the members of the study presented the architecture as a story, a fiction, sometimes a ritual, but rarely a building or construction.
"Architecture never touches the great themes, the fundamental themes of our lives. Architecture remains at the edge of our life, and intervenes only at a certain point in the process, usually when behavior has already been codified, furnishing answers to rigidly stated problems. (...) It then becomes an act of coherence, or a last try at salvation, to concentrate on the re-definition of the primary acts, and to examine, in the first instance, the relationships between architecture and these acts."
Superstudio, 1972
Life after Architecture is the first major exhibition in France dedicated to the work of this Italian group. The exhibition will present the most significant artworks over the entire floor area of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire.
The chapters of the exhibition follow the group's conceptual pathways to present both the chronology of the work and an intellectual multidisciplinarity, in order to understand the impact of these ideas on the fundaments of architecture. The exhibition presents the fictional forms of writing of the architecture in an exhaustive manner: sometimes by convoking founding myths (the fundamental acts: Death, Love, Ceremony, Education, and Life) while at other times proclaiming the death of architecture (the Istogrammi or the Monumento Continuo). Through these acts, the members of Superstudio presented architecture as a story, a fiction, sometimes a ritual, but rarely a building or construction. The discipline is about writing: that of "Our lives [which] will be our only architecture." From room to room, the work of Superstudio will invite us to experience a poetics of wandering that we are delighted to embrace at the Frac Centre-Val de Loire.
But it will also be a question of discovering the repeated attempts to influence the profession of architect and the typologies of construction directly, through the presentation – for the first time – of catalogues of villas and the production of new models in collaboration with the group's members.
In order to deepen the philosophical and historical dimension of the work and narrativise the exhibition’s message, each chapter is broached in a simultaneously chronological and multidisciplinary manner. In order to bring the conceptual importance of Superstudio up to date, an entire floor has been dedicated to the radical European architectural landscape, based on the Frac Centre-Val de Loire Collection. This dialogue will be historically contextualised on the one hand, while also posing self-reflexive questions that will reveal the importance of Superstudio on the contemporary architectural scene.