‘From the Horror of Us and Our Surroundings’ Architectures of Unbuilding in Le dodici città ideali

Abstract

Superstudio’s Le dodici città ideali (‘The Twelve Ideal Cities’) appeared in various formats within numerous architectural magazines between 1971 and 1974 as a series of collaged drawings of cities accompanied by short texts and occasionally containing cautionary epilogues with reader ‘tests’. Readings of the project often foreground the speculative or ‘visionary’ potential of the city images: unbuilt architectural representations describing a series of terrifying scenarios for the future of the urban environment. This essay looks beyond individual images of Le dodici città ideali to examine the textual content and contexts of its multiple published forms, departing from this future-focused framing and instead highlighting the project’s unwavering concern with the past and present.

In the pages of 都市住宅 (Toshi Jutaku), AD, Casabella, Archithèese, Architektur Aktuell, Αρχιτεκτονικά Θέματα (Architektoniká Thémata), and Cree, Superstudio’s intertwined textual and image-based descriptions of the city leveraged the architectural magazine to speak directly to the profession. Laminating the language and imagery of science fiction with references to magic, myth, and history, Superstudio choreographed a series of grand reveals: holding a mirror to the architect-reader placed within the late-capitalist conditions of their labour inside the pages of the architectural magazine.

Through a close reading of two published versions of Le dodici città ideali—‘Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas: Premonitions of the Mystical Rebirth of Urbanism’ in the December 1971 issue of AD, and ‘Premonizioni della parusia urbanistica’ (Premonitions on the Mystical Rebirth of Urbanism) in Casabella in January 1972—we highlight Superstudio’s deliberate rejection of architectural design as a future-oriented exercise. Focusing on contextualising the work within the architectural magazine format, we suggest that the cities of Le dodici città ideali cannot be thought of purely as ‘unbuilt’. Rather, the project sets in motion an architecture of unbuilding through its capacity to reveal ‘the horror of us and our surroundings’ as conditions that already exist in the 1970s. By examining Le dodici città ideali as an ‘architecture of unbuilding’, we consider how published images and text can unbuild existing conditions, prioritising the retrospective and destructive character of architectural design within the context of the architectural magazine.