PurplePrice Mag · · 2 min read
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The Sacco is the armchair that questioned the very idea of an armchair: no legs, no back, no frame. It was designed in 1968 by three young designers from Turin, Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro, and is made by Zanotta.
A shape that moulds itself to the body
The three designers had opened a studio in Turin in 1965. Instead of inventing complicated mechanisms to adapt the seat to the body, they imagined a shape that would do it by itself, simply through inertia, and an object to be lifted and carried around just like a sack: the first prototype even had a handle. They first offered it to a large chemical company, which turned it down, and then to Zanotta, which refined it and put it into production within five months. In 1969 it was shown at the Paris furniture fair and became one of the greatest commercial and cultural successes in furniture.
How it is made
The Sacco is a drop-shaped cover, only partly filled with thousands of expanded polystyrene beads. When you sit down, the beads move and the chair takes the shape of the person using it. The cover is fabric or leather, with a zip at the base for changing the filling. It is a light, informal object with no fixed orientation: it sits on the floor and is used however you like.
An icon of the 1960s
With its freedom, the Sacco became a symbol of the nonconformist design of those years, close to Pop and Radical design. In 1972 it was in MoMA's major exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, and today it is in the collections of MoMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Triennale Design Museum. It also entered popular culture: in Italy many remember it from the film Fracchia la belva umana (1981), starring Paolo Villaggio. Selected for the Compasso d'Oro in 1970 without winning, it received the award fifty years later, in 2020.
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