Archizoom-Associati

Italian radical design begins in Pistoia in December 1966, when Archizoom Associati and Superstudio mount Superarchitettura in two rooms of a provincial gallery and publish a founding statement against the modernist project. The movement runs for roughly thirty years from that exhibition to the opening of the Groninger Museum in 1994, passes through three distinct organisational forms — the Florentine collectives of 1966–1974, the Milanese teaching networks of Global Tools and Studio Alchimia in 1973–1980, and Memphis Milano in 1980–1988 — and is carried throughout by three protagonists whose careers overlap and intersect: Andrea Branzi, Ettore Sottsass, and Alessandro Mendini. The shape of the answer is a lineage, not a school. There is no single manifesto and no single object. There is a chain of groups, magazines, exhibitions and pieces of furniture in which each generation re-stages the argument of the previous one with different materials, different cities and different enemies. ...

Toyo Ito picked eight Andrea Branzi works for Continuous Present at Triennale Milano (19 March – 4 October 2026), and the earliest is a 1968 photograph of Branzi himself — not a chair, not a building. The eight picks are the curatorial spine of a show co-produced with Fondation Cartier that holds more than 400 works across eleven thematic sections in Giovanni Muzio’s Palazzo dell’Arte. Ito, working with Triennale’s Michela Alessandrini and Nina Bassoli, did not assemble a greatest-hits list. He assembled a thesis. The companion Continuous Present overview maps the architecture of the exhibition; this article maps the eight objects Ito singled out as the load-bearing argument and reads them as a sequence — Autoritratto (1968) through Voliera (2016), a forty-eight-year arc that the title of the show insists is one continuous moment. ...