GLOBAL TOOLS  1973-1975

In January 1973, a gathering took place in Milan at the editorial office of the magazine ‘Casabella,’ involving, among others, the architects and designers Ettore Sottsass Jr., Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi, Riccardo Dalisi, Remo Buti, Ugo La Pietra, Franco Raggi, Davide Mosconi, and members of the groups Archizoom, 9999, Superstudio, UFO and Zziggurat. Together with the conceptual artists and intellectuals Franco Vaccari, Giuseppe Chiari, Luciano Fabro and Germano Celant, they founded Global Tools - a system of workshops that would last until 1975.

For the first time in the forty years that have passed since its formation, the experience of the Global Tools counter-school has been brought together in book form by SALT, uniting the images and archive documents that were produced over the few short years of its existence. This volume is compiled to chronicle and evaluate the three years of seminar activity that took place between Florence, Milan and Naples in the early 1970s, bringing to a wider audience the story of this tentative attempt to realize an experimental dispersed educational program that would serve as an alternative to the university as an institutional model of reference.

The aim of Global Tools 1973-1975 (Body, Communication, Construction,
Survival and Theory) is to provide a tool for the understanding and reconstruction of the experience shared by, among others, the architects and designers Ettore Sottsass Jr., Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi, Riccardo Dalisi, Remo Buti, Ugo La Pietra, Franco Raggi, Davide Mosconi, and members of the groups Archizoom, 9999, Superstudio, UFO and Zziggurat; conceptual artists and intellectuals Franco Vaccari, Giuseppe Chiari, Luciano Fabro and Germano Celant. The book also contextualizes Global Tools within a more complex network of references and connections. The critical perspectives offered by the contributions of experts and scholars are employed to shed light on those aspects of contemporary experience shared by this pedagogical utopia with the wider world.

And, the book can be downloaded free from SALT bookshelf.