The Last Supper
Adolfo Natalini
THE LAST SUPPER
A short lecture given at RISD, 1972
Good evening:
My name is Adolfo Natalini and this lecture is entitled: Superstudio / The last supper. I would like to explain at once what Superstudio is and afterwards, perhaps at the end, I would like to explain what the “last supper” means to us.
Architecture has been the object of consumption for a long time, in various ways, producing a large part of the environment which surrounds us.
Many have been invited to the banquet of architecture, and many more have been and are feasting there…
We have had architecture for breakfast, lunch and dinner… sometimes with terrible complications for our stomach.
As of now, we can no longer use architecture like a food.
Perhaps we can only use it as a form of therapy: to provoke disgust for architecture itself and to allow something else to be born, another possible form of action.
I would like to be able to tell a story about architecture vanishing, something like this:
Architecture, having become perfect and rational, advances, incorporating different realities and at last is transformed, not losing itself, but re-finding itself, into its ultimate essence of natural philosophy.
The action of designing thus coincides ever more with existence itself: no longer existence within the shelter of “designed” objects, but existence as a project.
The time is over when utensils generated ideas, or when ideas generated utensils. Now, ideas are utensils. It is with these new utensils that life can be freely structured in cosmic consciousness.
If the instruments of design have become as sharp as razors and as sensitive as sonar probes, we can use them for a delicate lobotomy.
Thus, beyond the convulsions of superproduction, a state of calm can be born in which to create a world without products and waste, a zone in which the mind can be energy and matter first of all, and also the end product, the only intangible consumer product.
The designing of a region free from the pollution of design is very similar to a project for an earthly paradise…
This is the definitive project / this is only one of the projects for marvellous metamorphoses…
Let us try once more to eat architecture:
Let us bring architecture to the last supper.