Deschooling, Manual Labour, and Emancipation: The Architecture and Design of Global Tools, 1973-75

In ‘Deschooling, Manual Labour, and Emancipation: The Architecture and Design of Global Tools, 1973-1975’, Sara Catenacci and Jacopo Galimberti look at Global Tools, an experimental collective of more than thirty Italian architects, designers, artists, and critics. These practitioners—among them Alessandro Mendini and Gaetano Pesce and the groups Archizoom Associati, Group 9999, and Superstudio—created and managed a system of experimental laboratories in Florence and Milan as a platform for creative expression through craft and manual labour. Their project was intended as an antidote to the perceived failures of modern design in the post-war landscape. They criticised what they interpreted as the blind trust in new technologies, which, they argued, had served only to expand the production of consumable goods and speculative building, rather than to enshrine the place of carefully crafted, thoughtfully consumed design where designer, architect, and society were meaningfully connected and in reciprocal dialogue with one another. Founded in 1973, less than a year after the Museum of Modern Art mounted the exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, Global Tools lasted three years before it disbanded. Catenacci and Galimberti consider the genesis, actions, and demise of Global Tools, and, in doing so, elucidate one flashpoint in the recurrent reconsideration of the moral, political, and epistemological underpinning of manual labour and crafts in design and architecture. (from the book introduction)