Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, the Italian architect who co-founded the radical design collective Superstudio, has died at the age of 78.
Di Francia started the radical design collective Superstudio in 1966 with Adolfo Natalini while studying at the University of Florence. They were subsequently joined by Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro and Roberto Magris, and Alessandro Poli.
Superstudio helped start Italy's radical architecture and design movement among the avant-garde in the 1960s and 1970s.
Di Francia denounced modernism
In 1966 Superstudio collaborated with Archizoom Associati to create a colourful installation-as-manifesto that denounced modernist architecture at the Superarchitettura show.
"Superarchitettura is the architecture of superproduction, superconsumption, superinduction to consume, the supermarket, the superman, super gas," the groups declared on a poster for the show. Superstudio's most famous work, produced in 1969, was Continuous monument: an architectural model for total urbanisation, which imagined a dystopian future where a super grid called Il Monumento Continuo covered the world. The series of photo collages were an attack on 1960s urban planning methods and modernism's penchants for concrete boxes.
Campaigner for sustainable urban planning
Born in Florence in 1941, Di Francia studied architecture at the prestigious University of Florence and graduated in 1968. His thesis, Holiday machine on the Calabrian coast, was published in Domus...