Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1969) is a series of conceptual architectural montages envisioning a single, endless grid structure wrapping the entire Earth in a seamless architectural skin.
The images show vast rectilinear forms cutting through deserts, mountains, and cities, their reflective surfaces erasing difference in favor of total homogeneity. At once austere and sublime, the project critiques modernism’s obsession with order and rationality by exaggerating it to an absurd extreme: a world reduced to pure geometry, where every landscape is subsumed under a single system.
Both parody and prophecy, Continuous Monument asks whether architecture, in its drive toward universal solutions, risks annihilating the very diversity and contingency that give life meaning. Its unsettling beauty lies in this tension—between the allure of order and the violence of total design.
From its stark grids to its planetary scale, Continuous Monument remains one of Superstudio’s most influential provocations, a radical refusal of architecture-as-object.
See also: Supersurface and Ceremonia
Images from MoMA and Drawing Matter.
