In 1971, Superstudio published their twelve Ideal Cities, “the supreme achievement of twen- ty thousand years of civilization, blood, sweat and tears”. After 44 years, CAMPO and Black Square Press ask twelve groups of architects to give their own answer to the original brief. The Superstudio piece was less about imagining the Future than it was about re-imagining Ar- chitecture as a form of knowledge and as a platform for thinking rather than mere practice. The format itself – one image and one text for each of the twelve cities –implies a project of an Archetype rather than a pragmatic solution to a problem.
In fact, these visions of ‘supreme achievement’ are not answers, but open questions.

Perfect and dystopian urban mechanisms where any incoherence is eliminated, they challenge the idea that space and bodily presence might not matter anymore in the future, while at the same time they provide an ironic commentary on the architect’s curse: that we have to be pro- jective and optimistic by default, even (or maybe especially) when civilization seems in fact to have come to an end.
While Superstudio’s response was intentionally dystopian, there might be other ways to interpret today the same brief. We still need architecture to put forward not only ideas for new forms of life, but also new possibilities for our political imagination to go beyond the current convention- al models.
CAMPO and Black Square invite twelve radical practices and thinkers to propose their own cautionary tale to be featured in a publication as well as an exhibition opening in Rome in the fall 2015.

The twelve proposals will become the starting point for a one-week workshop during which architecture students will try to develop, for each of the cities, a prototype of the space of the self in a 1:20 plaster model.

Featuring proposals by: Amid/Cero9, Dogma, Microcities, Behemoth, MapOffice, Didier Fiuza Faustino, Philippe Morel, Aristide Antonas, For-a+Beth Hughes + more

CAMPO is space to debate, study and celebrate Architecture founded in Rome by Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo, Luca Galofaro and Davide Sacconi in 2015. www.campo.space

BLACK SQUARE is a London-based publishing and educational platform founded by Maria S. Giudici, diploma unit master of Unit 14 at the Architectural Association. www.black-square.eu 

Find all the infos about the workshop at http://www.black-square.eu/events.html