Sketchbook 12 and the Continuous Monument: Adolfo Natalini

The Continuous Monument, developed by the Italian collective Superstudio during summer 1969, is one of the most known visionary projects within the history of architecture. In sketchbooks Number 11 and 12, dated over a few months between May and November 1969, much of the story of the Continuous Monument emerges – as it were, fully-fledged – from its first conception as a belt around Florence, and its later ambitious circumnavigation of the globe, to its diffident public manifestation – at the scale of a gallery – for the first of the two exhibitions in Graz in 1969. The drawings became the basis of the now better-known Superstudio collages.

On 12 March 1988, founding member Adolfo Natalini met with Tina di Carlo in his Florence studio to speak through the sketches of Sketchbook 12. This publication chronicles the four-part conversation, in which Natalini talks through his love of drawing and sketching; one of the first manifestations of the Continuous Monument in the Grazerzimmer for the 1969 Trigon Biennale; the evolution of the Continuous Monument, from sketchbooks Numbers 7 and 11 to sketchbook Number 12, and the more general history behind Superstudio. The commentary sits alongside a compendium of sketches, excerpted from the now reversibly disbound sketchbook Number 12 and several selections from sketchbooks Number 7 and 11. Also included in the publication are a foreword by Niall Hobhouse; Superstudio: Photomontage at the Time of the Glue by Gian Piero Frassinelli, and an afterword by Tina di Carlo.

Edited by Tina di Carlo. Published by Drawing Matter Somerset, 2018.