ABSTRACT
The competition for the University of Florence in 1970 was too attractive not to be entered by the radical Florentine groups who had recently graduated from the same university that the competition was asking to be rethought and expanded. Among them, Archizoom had emerged in 1966 as the most vocal, Marxist-oriented, critics of an idea of society and of architecture that many of their teachers still promoted. The Florence competition happened a few years into Archizoom’s development of a critique of the city that built on the theses of Manfredo Tafuri and the Italian Operaist movement. Their entry acted as an applicative test bed for what, a few months later, was published under the name No-Stop City. Whereas the latter was a deliberately exaggerated depiction of the condition of a totally urbanised world under a capitalist regime – the idea of a city-factory discussed by the Operaists – the competition entry retained the character of a projective scenario of change vis-à-vis the status quo of the Italian university. Predating what, at the end of the 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard discussed as a postmodern condition marked by the substitution of en bloc knowledge by piecemeal information, Archizoom’s competition panels suggested individualised pathways of knowledge as weak territorialisations within a vast urban landscape. No longer the stable institution of the past, the university lost all of its traditional components to become a series of superimposed surfaces for the exchange of information, research, residential and leisure activities, which were continuously recombined by the individual subject who was set – or forced to be – free. Hinting at a society of individual accomplishments but without envisaging how such a scenario would be neutralised by the project of neoliberalism in subsequent years, Archizoom’s project offered a visual interpretation of Ivan Illich’s urgent call, in the same years, for a deschooled society.
