Jingqi Kay Liu

Translated from “Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore, Morte: cinque storie del Superstudio” by Superstudio; Originally published in “Casabella”, N.367-381, 1972-1973

The Fundamental Acts

The great themes, the fundamental themes of our life, have never been touched by architecture. Architecture stays on the sidelines, and intervenes only at certain point in the relationship process, when usually all behavior has already been codified, providing answers to rigidly posed problems. Even if its answers are aberrant or subversive, the logic of their production and consumption avoids any real upheaval. The architecture does not propose alternative behavior since it uses tools set up by the system to avoid any substantial deviation.
    Thus the works’ house and the stately villa follow the same models and the radical architect and academic architect are equivalent: the difference lies only in the quantities involved; decisions on the quality of life have already been made.
    By accepting this role, the architect becomes an accomplice in the machination of the system for which he seeks consent. The avant-garde architect then fills one of the more rigidly fixed roles, a bit like the “young lovers” (in plays).
    At this point the architect, recognizing in himself and in his work connotations of cosmetics, environmental pollution and ‘consoler of the afflicted’, suddenly stops on his well-paved path.
    It then becomes an act of coherence, or a last attempt at salvation, to focus on the redefinition of the primary acts, and examine in the first instance what are the relationships between architecture and these acts.
    This operation becomes a therapy for the removal of archimania.
    The attempt at a new foundation, anthropological and philosophical, of architecture becomes the center of our reductive processes.

Summary