The Pier Luigi Nervi Archive, CSAC University of Parma
The Communication Study and Archive Centre (CSAC) of the University of Parma is a research centre on 20th-century and contemporary Italian visual and design culture that carries out collection, protection, conservation, and valorisation activities through the cataloguing of the large archive set up at the end of the 1960s. Thanks to the activity of collecting works, funds of designers, architects, photographers and collections of books, clothes, objects and films conducted by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle since the late 1960s, the CSAC now preserves and manages an immense archive of works of art, photographs and design materials organised in 5 sections Art, Photography, Media, Project and Entertainment.
We can recall a few numbers to give an idea of the extent of this archive kept in the rooms of the Valserena Abbey: more than 1,700 paintings, 300 sculptures and 17,000 drawings by over 200 artists; 7,000 sketches for posters and 2,000 film posters as well as archives of graphic artists (about 100,000 pieces), more than 14,000 drawings of satire, comics and illustration; 2,500,000 project drawings of architecture and design, 800 maquettes, 2,000 objects, then 70,000 drawings by Italian fashion designers and an important nucleus of clothing; a collection of photographs consisting of more than 2,500,000 plate negatives, 2,200,000 film negatives, 1,700,000 photographic prints, 150 cameras, finally 100 film prints, 4,000 videotapes and a collection of graphic, typographic, optical and audiovisual equipment from the early 20th century.
Over the decades, such a heritage has been the subject of research and more than a hundred exhibitions, starting from the first monographic exhibition dedicated to Concetto Pozzati in 1968 in the Salone Farnese of the Pilotta, up to the exhibitions set up in 2016 in the current location of the Cistercian Abbey of Valserena, where the centre was moved in 2007, coming from its second location, the Padiglione Nervi.
The Pier Luigi Nervi fund was donated to the University of Parma by the heirs Mario, Carlo, Vittorio, Irene, Clara Nervi, Lucia Nervi Amalfitano, Mirella Giuseppina Nervi, and the deed was formalised on 23rd October 1986. This fund consists mainly of all the design documentation (correspondence, design drawings, notes and technical drawings) produced by Pier Luigi Nervi throughout his professional activity.
The fund that documents Pier Luigi Nervi’s activity from the 1920s, when he opened his professional studio in Rome together with Architect Nebbiosi, to the 1970s / 1980s, is mainly made up of graphic documentation related to the different project phases from the initial studies to the executive drawings.
The fund consists of 35,119 design materials, subdivided into 847 designs, as follows:
23,819 drawings on tracing paper, 2,787 heliographic copies, 329 heliographic copies with interventions, 5,814 radex sheets, 924 modified radex sheets, 255 acetates, 6 photographic films, 154 manuscripts, 123 typescripts, 825 spreadsheets, 80 photographic prints, 3 models.
Of all the documents that were kept in the archives of the studio at Magliana, an inventory list was initially drawn up for donation, then (1992-93) a project-based filing was conducted, and supplemented between 1995 and 1996 after the acquisition of a further tranche of documentation. Thanks to funding from the Emilia-Romagna Region, the indexing was entered into the Sebina application of the Parma Bibliographic Pole, using the cataloguing module for graphics and maintaining the subdivision by project.