This article reflects on the visual, spatial, and textual devices deployed by the Architettura Radicale in the 1960s and 1970s through a discussion of a pedagogical project developed for undergraduate architecture students from Monash University, Australia, as part of a travelling intensive based in Prato, Italy. At the time, Prato became the subject of debate about the rapid expansion of consumer culture in Italy, as underscored in Claudio Greppi’s graduating project, ‘Territorial City-Factory’ (1964-5). This architectural proposal rendered the area between Prato and Florence as a totalising city-factory, a proposition that was later developed under Archizoom as ‘No-Stop City’ (1968-70). Greppi’s recasting of Prato as a site for political and architectural experimentation became the catalyst for a teaching-led research project, re-examining the work of the Radical movement in Tuscany. In collaboration with architect and artist Gianni Pettena, the intensive sought to draw out the performative and embodied approaches implicit in his own work and that of his peers including UFO and 9999, as well as the rhetorical devices embedded within the critical fictions of Superstudio and Archizoom. By first dissecting and then redeploying these techniques in response to a site-specific brief, the ultimate pedagogical aim was to expose the students to an expanded range of architectural approaches and to re-evaluate the nature of radical practices ‘within and against’ the omnipresent struggles of late capitalism, and the contemporary cultural and educational context of neoliberalism and the university.

Illustrations by George MellosGianni Pettena (1940) has been described as an 'architect by training and artist by protest', 1 and an 'architect actively on strike'. 2 Both a member of the Florentine branch of the Architettura Radicale and a selfproclaimed outsider -as insinuated by his contribution to the iconic Global Tools portrait, in which he holds up a sign: Io sono la spia, or 'I am a spy' -Pettena's work was unique among the group in its deep affinities with the land art and the American countercultural movement, as an extension of earlier, anti-capitalist ideas pursued in Italy that explored the decoupling of function from form in architecture. Pettena spent much of the 1970s in America, where he developed friendships with Buckminster Fuller and affiliations with Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clarke. 3 In the US, Pettena's research on non-conformist architectural tools and practices was developed within the context of countercultural movements and pacifist networks, coinciding with a renewed antiauthoritarianism in the arts and in society, more broadly. He recalls: At the time, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and R. B. [Buckminster] Fuller were all involved in the shaping of a youth counterculture, which was enthusiastically thought to provide a theoretical and philosophical platform for all those people who were longing to give their support in the building of a pacifist future, free from confines, yet who lacked the time to actually theorise it. And yet, as Pettena goes on to add, this fundamentally anarchic aspect of architecture and design arq (2022), 26.4, 385-391.