Not all innocence is lost; Art Center has it on display

“Superstudio: Life Without Objects,” at Art Center College of Design, is not about to ruffle any feathers. Its appeal will be limited mostly to design students and architecture junkies. And of these, most are apt to dismiss the show’s 1960s and ‘70s imagery as part of the current craze for retro fashion statements.

That’s a shame. Like the more ambitious show on Minimalism on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, “Superstudio” takes us back to an era when architects and artists sought to imbue their work with social and political meaning. In that context, simplicity could be an act of subversion. If it could look sexy doing it, so much the better.

No one understood this better than Superstudio. Based in Florence, Italy, the firm’s architectural palate of plain geometric forms and endless grids can seem relatively banal. Conceived at a gargantuan scale, its most memorable designs were never built.

The group’s real currency was ideas. Underneath the sometimes excruciating pop references, firms like Superstudio were often able to articulate a more powerful message: how architecture could be used as a tool of both rebellion and seduction. What they were taking aim at was a consumer culture that seemed to be running amok.

The show opens with a series of photo montages that come close to pop culture parody. In one, students are depicted waving red flags in front of the blank stone facade of a “resistance” monument. In another, the firm’s principal members -- their long hair and bushy mustaches a cliche of ‘70s grooming -- gaze out at the camera from what could be the album cover for a rock band.

This was not simply an act of vanity. For collaboratives from the Smithsons to Archigram and, more recently, Coop Himmelblau, it reflected a genuine desire to pull the profession out of its academic isolation. In the process, such firms hoped to have a more meaningful effect on mass culture than architects of the past, as well as to demonstrate their allegiance to counterculture values.

This agenda becomes apparent as one wanders deeper into the show. The main gallery is dominated by a series of white, abstract building blocks laid out along the floor in a rigid, repetitive grid -- looking very much like the handiwork of an obsessive-compulsive 6-year-old. Dubbed Histograms, these forms are conceived as a flexible design system that would eventually make architects irrelevant.

In another corner, a video presents a sort of mock manifesto in which the upper classes abandon their Cadillacs, Rolls-Royces and private jets to enter a world stripped of consumer distractions. In the ensuing silence, we become keenly aware of our own physical presence -- the blood pumping methodically through our veins.

Such ideas would verge on absurd if the accompanying images were not so compelling. But where the group’s rhetoric can feel painfully outdated, the power of many of the photo montages can still force you to look at familiar contexts with a sharpened sensitivity.

The effect can be mesmerizing, as in a 1972 image titled “Cubic Forest on the Golden Gate.” An early photo montage, it depicts a typical postcard view of the San Francisco bridge, its midsection encased in an enormous block of vegetation. The city’s chaotic skyline looms in the distant background. The gigantic green cube evokes both an escape and a prison -- a peaceful antidote to the disorder that surrounds it.

Other images set up a more stark contrast between order and chaos, rational and sensual worlds. “Continuous Monument,” for example, is presented as a series of images depicting a mega-building whose seamless form would extend from the European countryside to cities like New York and Mecca. Clad entirely in glass and superimposed over the existing landscape, the structure’s monolithic form vaguely evokes the corporate office complexes of postwar America. But here the buildings’ uniform surfaces act to reveal what is already there, to push life into the foreground. Rather than obliterate the existing context, its aim is to highlight difference. The design’s mind-numbing homogeneity becomes a virtue.

In a classic image from this series, a system of mirrored buildings is superimposed onto Manhattan’s grid. The mirrored surfaces reflect a calm blue sky softened by white clouds. By comparison, Manhattan’s jagged skyscrapers evoke a landscape erupting with unconscious urges. The beauty of the image stems from the tension between the two. It is up to the observer to decide which is heaven and which is hell.

Similarly, in one of the show’s most moving images, a rosy-cheeked little girl stands in the middle of a small patch of dirt, a broom in her hands and a broken chair by her side. From here, the girl gazes out at an endless plane of glass that surrounds her on all sides. The contrast is unsettling. The girl seems like a prisoner, stuck in a squalid, decaying world. But the uniform look of the glass is a questionable temptation. It suggests a pure but essentially vacuous universe. Without the dirt, the entire composition would become a scene of absolute horror.

Such a vision would have baffled the early Modernists. When Adolf Loos proclaimed that all ornament was crime, he was seeking to wipe away centuries of Medieval squalor; Modernism also risked erasing our collective memory. Superstudio’s answer was a more self-critical approach. Rather than a total vision of the future, it sought to provide a new framework for understanding our exiting world. Its aim was to lure unconscious desires out into the open.

Naive? Of course. But it is the innocence of Superstudio’s approach that makes its work so refreshing today -- an age when the accepted pose, even in youth culture, is a cool, detached cynicism.