In 1972, the architecture design collective Superstudio arrived in New York along with many other Italian designers for MoMA's Italy: the New Domestic Landscape exhibition. At the time, they were labelled 'radical'. In 2016 the Maxxi Museum did a 50th retrospective of their work which had presented 'an alternative model for life on earth...a final attempt of design...for a society no longer based on work and on power and violence.." By 2020 they can no longer be called radical but rather prescient. Their theories about the need to reduce waste, overproduction, superfluous design, consumerism, and rather to encourage living with nature, to take only what we need with us on our backs, to look to the sun, the clouds, the stars, to live without possessions on a grid and simply plug in wherever you are now resonate in a contemporary way. "Life will be the only environmental art", they once wrote. In this time of Covid, their message aligns with the message of Earth Day 2020. 

Images of Gli anti fundamentali, Self Portrait, Poltronova sofa all by Cristiano Toraldo di Francia; Images of Il Monumento Continuo and Atti Fondamentali Vita - Supersuperficie. Pulizie di primavera, by Superstudio, all courtesy Fondazione Maxxi, Roma.