Superstudio's Quaderna 2600 dining table

Superstudio was an architecture firm, founded in 1966 in Florence, Italy by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia. One of Italy’s ‘anti-design’ groups, Superstudio was the result of the late ’60s counter-culture who rebelled against the slickness of La Dolce Vita and planned to design buildings and furniture with a philosophical content and a radical attitude.

The duo met while studying architecture at the University of Florence and later they were joined by Alessandro and Roberto Magris and Piero Frassinelli. Together the five members began to design together in Florence which they felt was critical to its work.

“It is the designer who must attempt to re-evaluate his role in the nightmare he helped to conceive, to retread the historical process which inverted the hopes of the modern movement,” pronounced Toraldo di Francia. “And in Italy, Florence, a town where all such contradictions become most evident (the moment one draws the curtains of mythically misrepresented past) stands historically symbolic.”

One of my favourite pieces by Superstudio is the Quaderna collection designed in 1970, in particular the 2600 dining table. The ‘Op Art’ patterned laminate is a silk-screen printed grid, suggestive of renaissance geometry and the stage sets of Serlio.

Natalini wrote in 1971 “…if design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design; if architecture is merely the codifying of bourgeois model of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities…until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then, design must disappear. We can live without architecture…”

Sadly, in 1978 six years after they designed the Quaderna table, Superstudio decided the abandon the collective and work as separate people although their work is still licensed and produced.