Valerio Borgonuovo, Silvia Franceschini (eds.): Global Tools, 1973-1975 (2015)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1970s, architecture, art, body, city, design, education, learning, self-education
“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 (firstly in Florence, Milan and Naples) promoting the ‘study and use of natural materials and their behavioural characteristics’ with the support of media (namely the magazine Casabella) and aimed to establish an alternative relation with the Italian industry.”
“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, 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 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.”
With contributions by Manola Antonioli, Valerio Borgonuovo, Alison J. Clarke, Beatriz Colomina, Silvia Franceschini, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco Raggi, Simon Sadler, and Alessandro Vicari.
Publisher SALT, Istanbul, July 2015
Creative Commons BY NC ND 3.0 License
ISBN 9789944731461
173 pages
Mikkel Bolt, Jakob Jakobsen (eds.): Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (2015)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, art, capitalism, everyday, life, politics, scandinavia, situationists, spectacle
“This is the first ever English-language anthology collecting texts and documents from the still little-known Scandinavian part of the Situationist movement.
The book covers over three decades of writing, from Asger Jorn’s Luck and Chance published in 1953, to the statements of the Situationist Antinational set up by Jens Jørgen Thorsen and J.V. Martin in 1974. The writings collected gravitate around the year 1962 when the Situationist movement went through it’s most dynamic and critical moments, and the disagreements about the relationship between art and politics came to a culmination, resulting in exclusions and the split of the Situationist International.
The Situationists did not win, and the almost forgotten Scandinavian fractions even less so. The book broadens the understanding of the Situationist movement by bringing into view the wild and unruly activities of the Scandinavian fractions of the organisation and the more artistic, experimental, and actionist attitude that characterised them. They did, nevertheless, constitute a decisive break with the ruling socio-economic order through their project of bringing into being new forms of life. Only an analysis of the multifaceted and often contradictory Situationist revolution will allow us to break away from the dull contemplation of yet another document of Debord’s archive or yet another drawing by Jorn.
There is a lot to be learned from the history of revolutionary failure. It is along these lines that this book points forward beyond the crisis-ridden capitalist order that survives today.”
Texts by Asger Jorn, Jørgen Nash, Jens Jørgen Thorsen, Bauhaus Situationniste, Jacqueline de Jong, Gordon Fazakerley, Gruppe SPUR, Dieter Kunzelman, J.V. Martin, and Guy Debord.
Translated by Peter Shield, James Manley, Anja Buchele, Matthew Hyland, Fabian Tompsett, and Jakob Jakobsen
Publisher Nebula, Copenhagen, in association with Autonomedia, New York, May 2015
This book can be freely pirated and quoted except for the texts covered by copyrights.
ISBN 9788799365180 (Nebula), 9781570273049 (Autonomedia)
304 pages
Publisher (Nebula)
Distributor (Minor Compositions)
See also Bolt, Jakobsen (eds.), Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere, 2011.
More on Situationists
Charles Jencks, Karl Kropf (eds.): Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture (1997)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, architecture, city, history of architecture, manifesto, modernism, postmodernism, theory, urbanism
A survey of 120 texts on architecture from the late 1950s up to the mid-1990s, presented in excerpts organised into five sections.
Publisher Academy Editions, Chichester, UK, 1997
ISBN 0471976873
312 pages
via hindmnj
See also Ulrich Conrads (ed.), Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, 1964/1970.
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