Superattico
Notes: Unreal Estate, Expensive Thoughts LTD
The penthouse is more than a privileged position in the city: it is a machine that organizes the gaze and stages a relationship with the panorama. In the apartment designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret for Charles de Beistegui in Paris (1929–1931), this condition becomes explicit. Terraces on several levels, mechanized hedges, a periscope and cinematic devices turn the view into a constructed, selected and reproduced experience. The panorama is not simply there, before the viewer; architecture frames it, reveals it and withdraws it, making it a representation of the city.
The penthouse also carries a less visible domestic history. In many bourgeois houses, attic rooms were assigned to servants, placing service work at the top of the house while keeping it outside the family’s field of view. Read through Dolores Hayden’s material feminism, the attic’s elevation holds a classed and gendered contradiction: panoramas and social display depended on care and service work that was kept out of sight.
Superattico takes up the promise of the penthouse in its name and transforms it into a different urban condition. “Attico” suggests height, distance and expansiveness; the actual space is a pied-à-terre at street level, opening onto the everyday life of the neighbourhood. Here, the panorama expands: it becomes the circulation of images, ideas and practices, and the possibility of learning to look at the city together. Exhibitions, gatherings and conversations create a cultural outlook: a shared field of attention and imagination.
Since 2020, Superattico has been an independent space for cultural work and an urban living room—a parlour—where architecture, independent design, photography and poetry can meet. In dialogue with material feminism, Superattico takes the historical contradiction of the attic as a point of departure. It becomes a collective interior where cultural work and care practices form part of the infrastructure of public life. Welcoming, installing, maintaining, and bringing people, images and knowledge into relation: these activities shape the space as much as its walls. Superattico proposes a cultural panorama produced together, and a form of hospitality in which service becomes visible, shared and generative.