Global Tools. For an Archeology of the Future

Global Tools was a multidisciplinary experimental program of design education founded in 1973 in Italy by the members of the Radical Architecture including Ettore Sottsass Jr. and Andrea Branzi among others. It was conceived as a diffuse system of laboratories promoting the "[...] study and use of natural materials and their behavioral characteristics" aimed to establish an alternative relation with the Italian Industry. The movement developed in the complex Italian context of the early 1970s, oscillating between the vivid intellectual environment of operas theories and the critical political moment of terrorism known as “Years of Lead”. The idea underpinning this system of laboratories was to conjugate the most utopian aspirations of Radical Architecture with alternative life solutions promoted by Victor Papanek, and Stewart Brand's T he Whole Earth Catalog , in order to invent new operational "tools" for the upcoming era of globalization. Global Tools initiators invested in building a program of research and education outside of the institutional frame with the goal to free individual creativity from cultural superstructures that hindered or slowed its expressive capacity. The return to “primary tools” was seen as a possibility of emancipation from the rules of academia and as a space where possible to develop a new “ecology of mind”. Such way of thinking is emerging in the experimentations of contemporary designers, advocating for t he possibilities of open design systems, democratic and accessible as well as for the searching of alternatives of sustainable forms of design. The presentation contextualizes the experience of Global Tools within the strong utopic and distopic visions of the different groups named under the Radical Architecture movement. How Utopia became Dystopia whithin hypothesis of social, political and environmental collapse? Which strong input was given to contemporary design by the imagination of a “city without architecture” and of a “man without objects”?