Superstudio’s parable, a razor-sharp critique of disposable consumer culture, can seem to have come true, at least in the new megacities of Asia and the endlessly expanding exurbs of the US. Luckily, it is not possible to live in the same house for more than four years after its construction after this period, objects, accessories and the structure of the houses themselves decay, become unusable and soon after collapse.” The other citizens do their best and only those with little willpower and the laziest wait for four years before moving house. “The greatest aspiration of every citizen is to move more and more often into a new house because the houses produced are continually modernized and equipped with the yet more perfect commodities . . . The Great Families move monthly into the houses just built, following the rhythm of the Grand Factory. They continued with what can seem a diagnosis of contemporary real estate desire. The head of the city is the Grand Factory, 4 miles wide and 100 yards high, like the city it continuously produces . . . The Grand Factory devours shreds of useless nature and unformed minerals at its front end and emits sections of completely formed city, ready for use, from its back end.”
“The city moves,” they wrote, “unrolling like a majestic serpent over new lands, taking its 8 million inhabitants on a ride through valleys and hills, from the mountains to the seashore, generation after generation. Perhaps the best is their 1971 idea of the “Continuous Production Conveyor Belt City”. Not very well-known beyond the hermetic world of architectural theory, the Italian collective Superstudio left us with some of the most brilliant and critical parables in the history of modern urbanism. But do cities have to remain static? Could they avoid their destiny if they just moved on?
Quite literally, they sink into the earth or the water as consecutive layers pile up above them. The one thing certain in urbanism is that all cities, no matter how great, at some point decline.
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