THE SACCHI COLLECTION: FROM THE MODEL TO THE OBJECT
BY SILVANA ANNICCHIARICO, BARBARA FERRIANI, FRANCESCA CATERINA IZZO, ELISABETTA ZENDRI, Triennale Design Museum, Milan, Italy, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice-Mestre, Italy

 

Since 2012 Triennale Design Museum Conservations Department has launched a project about the
conservations of about 300 models from the Sacchi Collection, owned by Regione Lombardia and entrusted to the Triennale.
The Collection is made by maquettes of design objects: refrigerators, clocks, radios, typewriters, sewing
machines, televisions, telephones, computers, etc. but also architecture models.
Since the Post War until 1997, thanks to the meeting with Marcello Nizzoli and with the world of industrial
design, the workshop of the Milanese modeller Giovanni Sacchi, has been a crossroad of experiences,
meetings, experiments that contributed to the success of the Made in Italy. Almost all of the most famous
designers, Italian and foreign, worked in the workshop in via Sirtori (from Nizzoli to Castiglioni, from Munari to Zanuso, from Bellini to Sottsass, from Sapper to Colombo and many others). Sacchi’s design and architecture maquettes testify a working method. They allow you to see the project as a work in progress, as a progressive approach to the final result, and they tell how the designer has dealt with different problems during the realization of the project and how, each time, he solved them.
Meanwhile, the Conservation Department was also undertaking a project for the conservation and
restoration of many objects, part of the Collection, realized by the factories starting from the Sacchi’s models.
The paper will focus on the main theoretical and practical issues faced by the conservation of both the
models and the serial objects, and a selection of them will be presented as case studies.
In addition, we report the preliminary results of an ongoing research carried by the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice (Conservation Science), dealing with the identification of the composition of the materials of the
selected models and design objects and the definition of the degradation patterns of the different materials
involved.