  We provide global formulations of Vasiliev's four-dimensional minimal bosonic
higher spin gravities by identifying structure groups, soldering one-forms and
classical observables. In the unbroken phase, we examine how decorated Wilson
loops collapse to zero-form charges and exploit them to enlarge the Vasiliev
system with new interactions. We propose a metric phase whose characteristic
observables are minimal areas of higher spin metrics and on shell closed
abelian forms of positive even degrees. We show that the four-form is an on
shell deformation of the generalized Hamiltonian action recently proposed by
Boulanger and one of the authors. In the metric phase, we also introduce
tensorial coset coordinates and demonstrate how single derivatives with respect
to coordinates of higher ranks factorize into multiple derivatives with respect
to coordinates of lower ranks.
