Superstudio - Life Without Objects

"Architecture

My search for architecture now appears to me like that of the Graal, of the Philosopher's Stone, the Phoenix. And I believe I did not find it. I say "I believe" because I might even have found it without realizing it! I understand that this is not a very credible claim, but I shall try to explain. First of all let us see what I did NOT want to find:

           I did NOT want to find a monumental architecture.
           I did NOT want to find a fashionable architecture.
           I did NOT want to find a beautiful architecture.

           Instead I always sought a "skinless" architecture, an architecture in which the outside arises from the inside, straight out of the inner life of the men who live in it. And therefore architectures the outside of which could be utilized, gone through, touched, made use of just like the inside, plain and hill architectures, an anthill architecture for men (of course just the opposite of a phalanstery!); an "invisible" architecture (in the sense of the "invisible man"). that is why I say I did not find it. Indeed I fail to see it, even if I have a feeling that, like in the film on the "invisible man", it has grown close to me, on the verge of revealing its outline in a puff of dust, of steam or in the rain: pouring rain (like in Rashomon!) that Gavroche sought cover from in the elephant of the Bastille. The first example of an architecture/non architecture that enthralled me and may have conditioned me ever since, since I was a kid, a pal of Gavroche's, when I did not yet know I would become an architect.

           "Oh unexpected usefulness of the useless! Charity of great things! Bounty of giants! This outsize monument, that had contained one of the emperor's thoughts, had become an urchin's shell: the lad had been accepted and taken in by the colossus. the bourgeois would say, examining it with their bulging eyes and an expression of contempt: 'What is it good for?'" 
-Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Book VI,II. 

An architecture can be conciously negative, it can be intentionally designed to be unpleasant, uncomfortable, to not work.
-Bernard Tschumi

Florence, December 2002"

Excerpt from Superstudio - Life Without Objects, Pages 82-83.
Lang, Peter, and William Menking. Superstudio: Life without Objects. Milano (Italy): Skira, 2003. Print.