Modern Atlanta

Sacco Exhibition in Atlanta is Testimony to Italian Creativity & “The Italian Style”

Photography, courtesy Zanotta (Italy)

MA-ology “The Italian Style” in a special design exhibition happening in Atlanta and courtesy Zanotta (Italy), celebrates over 40 years of Zanotta’s revolutionary Sacco armchair and its non-stop production.  Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro designed Sacco in Italy in 1968.

Sacco’s creators, Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro

From the moment these 3 architects from Turin arrived at Zanotta with a PVC “bag” ¾ filled with polystyrene balls and the idea of developing an industrial project, the Sacco armchair started on its special journey. From a cult object and icon of light, modern and informal design, it set an unquestionable all-time international record to become one of the most important expressions of Italian creativity.

Design in 1968

1968 was a great year for design, with fireworks from Italian-style creativity. “Under the road the beach,” said the students of the Latin Quarter, when they found sand under the paving blocks dug up for their barricades. All Europe adopted the contestatory style of life and behaviour: goodbye to hand-kissing and suchlike, subdued manners and haughty posture and the affectation of bon chic bon genre behaviour; only cops stand to attention.

Vintage photo of Sacco, courtesy Zanotta (Italy)

Le meuble follows le mouvement. People didn’t come back from assemblies or protest meetings to sit rigidly on a Louis XV armchair or a Mackintosh dining chair. They lolled, they lounged, they unwound, they let their hair down. They sprawled on the floor and ate with their hands. In homes and canteens it was a permanent picnic. With their demystificatory and liberatory slogans the body followed the language of ideology: the primacy of comfort, of softness, of freedom of movement. People were ashamed to curl up in armchairs by big-name design firms, the trendy brands of the international furniture style, etc. They felt a horror of bumping into functional furniture that hadn’t been put in the place it deserved, seeing it was made for that.

So here’s the stroke of genius by Gatti, Paolini, Teodoro: the Sacco, a big pear-shaped bag of plastic or soft leather, two-thirds filled with polystyrene pellets. You sit in it, you throw yourself back, you sink into its soft forms that immediately cling to your body curves, absorbing the whole imprint of your movement, your position. The Sacco at rest looks like a shapeless heap, left there by chance, or almost, like something out of place: an element of aleatory disorder, a breath of freedom in the furnishings, a pause in the rigor of functional objects. Its success was immediate: it met the general need to loosen up the way people lived. The great idea you breathed was to live comfortably, the ease was that of a party, the absence of constraints. One forgot for an instant the ascetic lesson of Japanese purism.

It was Zanotta that presented the space of a party in Turin at Eurodomus 2. The wind of fantasy blew on the traditional spirit of Brianza: Willie Landels designed the monobloc sofa in foam polyurethane, all continuously elastic, Throw-Away: a name that sounded like a rock song. Because the fantasies of 1968 still preserve their relevance, their freshness, their effect. As if the great road roller of the return to order and the failure of ideologies by suffocation had not dominated the two decades that separate us from Zanotta’s burst of brilliance.

Faced with the aimless heaviness of everyday existence, our domestic civilization desperately needs fresh air and lightness to survive. Faced with the important gamble on the survival of the humanities within a technoculture, the collective unconscious is experiencing the necessary illusion of the absence of gravity, a premonitory symptom of our future inter-stellar tourism and our sentimental walks in the space void. This is why the Blow series, the transparent inflatable seating system by De Pas, D’Urbino and Lomazzi, at the height of the contestation did not make a wrinkle in the confused chaos of our post-modern agony in 1985 style. Furniture that is always young, ageless, and that expresses, by its lightness or softness, the eternal present of an art of living at 100.000 volts in all directions.

Pierre Restany, 1986 (from the book “Zanotta Design for Passion”, Raffaella Poletti, Electa, Milan 2004)

Sacco Today - “La Commedia del Sacco”

An Italian story….

Commedia dell’arte, theatre, cinema….Italian culture creates beautiful stories, one above all: design. We are about to tell you one celebrating 40 years: it is the story of three creative men and their encounter with an industrial manufacturer. The scenery is under the sign of freedom and the story tells of an object that adapts to the human body, where an inanimate object combines with life and how the spectator’s eye and soul perceive images, films. It is the story written by each of us putting our personal mark on the object created. A story, whose roots delve into large bags full of chestnut leaves in northern Italy, then transforms with polystyrene pellets in Nova Milanese and runs through the world.

40 Limited Edition Sacco, photo courtesy Zanotta (Italy)

A story continuing with the protagonist entering the stage with 40 haute couture fabrics  to celebrate its birthday. It is a story with 40 pieces for eternal youth, symbol of design.

Limited Edition Sacco, photo courtesy Zanotta (Italy)

Standard Sacco in a cluster arrangement, photo courtesy Zanotta (Italy)

One story, one scene written by Gatti, Paolini, Teodoro and Aurelio Zanotta: the Sacco. For more “The Italian Style” activities, including CARE Fundraiser, click here.

Zanotta is a proud supporter of MA09 Design Is Human.