Dune Part 2: Superstudio on Spice.
It was not just Carlo Scarpa and other odd Japanese sources that made their way into Dune Part 2, but also the Italian Radical Design group Superstudio and their conceptual architecture.
In my last newsletter, Space-Time Warp: Going from Japan to Italy to Planet Kaitain. A Dune of a Journey, I described the Italian fascination with Japan and it's connection to a pivotal scene in Dune 2 set in the Brion Tomb, designed by the renown Italian architect Carlo Scapa. I had this "divination” that the Tomb somehow communicated a much deeper message, one that combined Eastern and Western philosophies. Twenty years ago, on a visit to the Brion Tomb with students in 2004, I interviewed Vilma, the owner of the caffe in San Vito d’Altivole where Carlo Scarpa spent his time designing and re-designing the Brion family tomb, and with Bepe, the cemetery's custodian who was an eye witness to the Tomb's construction. The video is uploaded here: Vilma and Bepe remember Carlo Scarpa.
Searching Amazon the other day, I noticed that Superstudio: Life Without Objects (that I co-authored with William Menking) was going for an unusually hefty price. From past experience, demand for the book drives the price up, and therefore there must have been a recent surge in interest in the work of Superstudio: our edition is one of the only English publications on Superstudio that is still available on the resale market. Typing in the keywords Dune and Superstudio, I discovered a detailed article that highlighted the film's unique architectural sources. It was dated from the release of Denis Villeneuve's first Dune, around the time it was screened at the Film Biennale in Venice. I suspect that this article, as well as lots of others, were sucked into another feverish web-frenzy after the film Dune became a hit at the Oscars.
In just a couple clicks I reached a brilliant article by Jonathan Hilburg on the 2021 set production of Dune published in the Architect's Newspaper (disclaimer: I also contribute to the AN). Part I of Dune featured a pre-history to the main story on Arrakis, with its own aesthetic - the first portion of the film focused on the planet Caladan, the home world of the House of Atreides, the ostensibly “good” planetdom. Here the castle interiors were clearly inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, as Hilburg justly pointed out. The Chicago born architect Wright, whose rooms have been installed in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was himself deeply influenced by Japanese architecture. Wright is an interesting choice for this film, given the open spaces and clean horizontal lines that stand as defiant counterpoints to the typical gothic castle style favored by Hollywood. And you can draw a straight line from Wright to Scarpa: Scarpa’s passion for Japanese architecture had a lot to do with his deep fascination with Wright’s architecture.
Dune's resourceful set designer, Patrice Vermette, also a Canadian national and a close collaborator with Villeneuve, revealed several specific stylistic influences when interviewed by Hilburg. Vermette sought through the use of a Japanese palette, “to convey the idea of something that is ending, like a tradition that is going to fade away. It’s a passage to something else.” Hilburg exposed some of the set designer's primary sources: Vermette is quoted saying: “Obviously Brutalist architecture, but mostly Brazilian Brutalist architecture, because I find the lines interesting. I also found the massive structures of Superstudio from the ’60s and ’70s to be extremely inspiring. When you read the book, there’s the sense of scale, and when you look at the work of Superstudio, it’s [from] the same era. It’s the same psychedelic concepts.”
So where exactly does Superstudio's meta-vision for architecture fit in with the latest productions in the Dune film franchise? Is the obsession with Superstudio limited to their visual effects? Or was Vermette channeling something more profound, even something more sinister? Superstudio between 1969 and 1971 was rocking, producing spectacular projects on three scales simultaneously: the object, the monument and the city. Their absolute brilliance was in how these three scales could act interchangeably: the object could become the monument, the city could become the object. If you zoomed in on just the aesthetic, the repetitive square grid, you had before you a compositional system that could go from miniature to megalithic, but for which there was no inside, neither a spatial inside nor a conceptual inside. In this sense you could argue the object was terrorizing, otherworldly, and therefore a dominating force in the landscape.
Superstudio's Continuous Monuments, set in cities like Graz or New York, or in the open countryside, were conceived to go from one end of the earth to the other. The Monuments were totalizing, they were all encompassing. At the level of the object, Superstudio's Histogram series, the forerunner of Superstudio's core construct, demonstrated the design's intricate variables. Also referred to by the Florentine group as the “Tomb of the Architects,” the Histogram series would evolve, or devolve, depending on how you interpret them, into a much sought after furniture series called "Misura.”
So great, we find ourselves ending up in the “Tomb of Architects.” (The tomb is a recurrent theme: Villeneuve's Dune occupies Carlo Scarpa's tomb of tombs, the Brion Tomb in San Vito d’Altivole for their pivotal scene in the Emperor's gardens on the planet Kaitain ). In fact, the members of Superstudio were well aware that their Continuous Monument had become a huge international hit, despite the lack of any real life inside. The group didn't take long to come up with something to fill in the blank: “Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas, Premonitions of the Mystical Rebirth of Urbanism,” published first in AD magazine- London, in December of 1971. Also known as 12 Ideal Cities, written by Gian-Piero Frassinelli, the dozen urban set pieces go a long way in providing the kind of critical content that was otherwise lacking. Nothing short of dystopian, these twelve city-scale constructs emerge as ominous counterparts to the unlimited reach of the Continuous Monument. Were the makers of Dune aware that beneath these Continuous Monuments there were worlds of hopeless darkness? I assume so, they must have read the book.