[Hidden Architecture]

Within the ‘Conceptual Architecture’ issue of Design Quarterly (1970) is a documentary photograph-based piece titled [Hidden Architecture] by the Italian radical architecture collective Superstudio. The chapter demonstrates the steps of a process where three copies of an unknown architectural project were sealed and placed within a labelled zinc box, which was soldered shut. Concerned with societal and political issues, Superstudio exposed the hidden in architectural production. [Hidden Architecture] is a mute project within their mute oeuvre, emblematic of a group who left behind no built work. The piece marks their critique of architecture’s obfuscations and the mediums of its transmission. With [Hidden Architecture] the archived project may never be found; we are forever reliant on supplements - the label, documentary photographs and publication. Without these elements, this architecture of hiding would be unknown: it is the remaining marginal trace - or paracontextual phenomenon - that offers glimpses of an architecture carefully hidden from view. This chapter explores the apparatuses and modes that Superstudio employed in [Hidden Architecture], through notions of paracontextual practice, situating the piece within the wider context of Superstudio’s oeuvre to unveil the motives behind this architecture of hiding.