During the 1970s, the collection of fashion design and architectural and design design began. The design archives are located on the ground floor of the Palazzo della Pilotta, where the Design Department of the Communication Studies and Archives Centre opens in 1980. On the occasion of the presentation of the approximately 50,000 donated drawings, which at the time constituted the first nucleus of the archive funds of some of Milan’s leading designers, an important conference dedicated to Architectural Design took place, introduced by Giulio Carlo Argan, with the participation of the most authoritative representatives of our country’s design culture, from Gillo Dorfles to Vittorio Gregotti, from Bruno Zevi to Giovanni Klaus Koenig, and many others.
Between 1980 and 2000, important fonds were acquired, and architectural design now reaches one million pieces with large collections belonging to the archives of Gio Ponti, Ignazio Gardella, Giuseppe Samonà, Giuseppe De Finetti, Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, Pier Luigi Nervi. Over the past thirty years, the archives of Alpago designers Novello, De Finetti, Gardella, Menghi, Nervi, Ponti, Pulitzer, Rava, Samonà and designers such as Bellini, Castiglioni, Mari, Mendini, Munari, Nizzoli, Rosselli, Sambonet, Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Sottsass Jr. have been catalogued. The materials document the different stages of the design process, from sketches to executive drawings, totalling 1,500,000 architectural and design drawings, 800 maquettes, 2,000 objects.
In 2004, the registry of projects was finalised and catalogued in Sebina, which can now be consulted on the web by connecting to the University of Parma home page.
Consultations from 1980 to the present day have been uninterrupted, constituting almost daily access to the facility: these are students, scholars and curators from the major museums who come from all over the country and abroad to view the drawings of the major protagonists in the history of contemporary architecture that are conserved at the CSAC. Lending activity is also constant, exhibitions follow one another at a steady pace, while relations with other museum structures are intensified, we only recall for continuity of collaboration, the MOMA in New York and the Beaubourg in Paris.
As early as 1980, an important nucleus of drawings from the CSAC archives were featured in the exhibition Realisme entre revolution et reaction, 1919-39 at the Centre G. Pompidou in Paris. This important exhibition occasioned a collaborative relationship that would intensify over the years. Among the numerous exhibitions organised by the CSAC as a lending institution, we would like to mention at least that of Mario Bellini at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1987 and the exhibition of Afra and Tobia Scarpa at the International Design Center in New York, later presented at the Pac in Milan; that of Gio Ponti at the Jurakucho Art Forum in Tokyo in 1986, made entirely with materials conserved at the CSAC. At the Civiltà delle Macchine exhibition at Lingotto, the CSAC lent 200 drawings, practically the entire design section.
Ma l’elenco richiederebbe decine di pagine, tante sono le mostre costruite sui materiali della Sezione Progetto che hanno avuto luogo al Lingotto a Torino oppure a Milano alla Ansaldo e ancora alla Triennale. Dei primi anni Ottanta sono le rassegne monografiche con pubblicazione del catalogo dell’opera dedicate ad Alberto Rosselli (1981) e ad Enzo Mari (1982), a cura del CSAC ed allestite nel Salone delle Scuderie in Pilotta. Prende quindi corpo il progetto dell’edizione critica degli fondi nella collana Gli archivi del progetto inaugurata nel 1989 con il volume dedicato a Marcello Nizzoli, dove sono editati gli oltre 7.000 disegni donati allo CSAC. A seguire sono pubblicati volumi dedicati agli archivi di Ignazio Gardella (1998), Ettore Vitale (2001), Gio Ponti (2001), Alpago Novello, Cabiati e Ferrazza (2002).
The CSAC promotes the study and knowledge of archival materials with loans to requesting institutions and the consultation of archives open to students and scholars, but also supports seminar activities such as the recent conference Cantiere Nervi: La costruzione di un’identità, which took place at the Abbazia di Valserena, the current seat of the CSAC, in November 2010.
Recent exhibitions include at least the one dedicated by the Lausanne Polytechnic to Archizoom Associati (2007), the one on Pier Luigi Nervi’s youthful activity in Prato (2008), the monographic exhibition ‘I Gardella’ in Alessandria (2008), and the travelling exhibition ‘Pier Luigi Nervi L’architecture comme defi’, inaugurated at the CIVA in Brussels in June 2010 and subsequently presented in Turin and other national and international venues.
See the catalogue of the project section
