Industrious Ponti Led The Way

Italian master engaged tradition with modern to define 20th century design

For the past eight months this column has focused on the achievements of Italian architects and designers such as Vico Magistretti, Gae Aulenti, Joe Colombo, Gaetano Pesce and Giorgetto Giugiaro, all of whom have been leaders in their design disciplines as well as representative of the quintessence of modern Italian design. But even these legendary designers owe a debt of gratitude to the great Gio Ponti, a larger than life architect and designer who virtually single-handedly invented the concept of modern Italian industrial design in the 20th century.
In a career which spanned nearly 60 years, Gio Ponti initiated the relationship between traditional design and industry, designed houses and public buildings, taught architecture, designed objects from espresso makers and glassware to chairs and lamps, organized major Italian design exhibitions and founded an influential magazine. In her 1991 book The New Look: Design in the Fifties, British writer Lesley Jackson said that Ponti's "range of expression was astonishingly expansive". Noting that his designs could be characterized by both tradition and modernity, Jackson wrote that "Ponti's view of design was inclusive rather than exclusive, and there was no sense of discord or incongruity in his shift from one idiom to another".
Born in Milan in 1891 and a 1921 architecture graduate from the city's polytechnic, Ponti recognized early on that industry could offer a huge boost to Italy's deep tradition of artisan craftsmanship. In 1923 he took on the role of artistic director for ceramics manufacturer Richard Ginori and converted the artisanal enterprise into a company geared for mass production. "Industry is the style of the 20th century, its mode of creation," Ponti said. His efforts at Richard Ginori laid the groundwork and established a model for industrial design production in Italy following the Second World War.
The undoubtedly creatively restless Ponti left Richard Ginori in the early 1930s and established the kind of prolific activity which marked his long career. He started his own ceramics company, moved the Monza Triennale to Milan (the event is an Italian institution to this day) and began teaching architecture at Milan Polytechnic, a position he held until 1961. His product design over these years was equally impressive. He designed glassware and silverware for Venini, espresso makers for La Pavona, as well as lighting for Artemide and chairs for Cassina. Ponti's 1957 Superleggera chair for Cassina is perhaps his most famous product. Inspired by a traditional chair produced for Genoese fishermen, Ponti modernized the design to create Superleggera, which is still produced today by Cassina. Ponti's most famous architectural work was also realized in the late 1950s. The Pirelli Tower, a collaboration with acclaimed engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, was Italy's first skyscraper and its slim elegant profile quickly earned it the status of architectural icon. (The tower will undergo its first significant restoration after a tragic event in the spring of 2002, when a small aircraft flown by a lone pilot struck the tower.)
As if all of these achievements were not enough for Ponti, in 1928 he founded Domus magazine, which to this day is perhaps the monthly bible of the international design community. With interruptions of only a few years, Ponti presided over the magazine as its publisher until his death in 1979. In response to a recent Ponti retrospective shown in London, Rotterdam and Milan, Domus contributor Stefano Casciani had this to say about the Italian master's architecture: "Ponti was never maniacal about order. His buildings, more than his objects, are certainly harmonious, but when necessary and when permitted by the client, they do not sacrifice a certain eccentricity, understood as a flight from classical harmony".
Despite his prolific output in many areas of design, architecture was clearly near and dear to Ponti and a declaration of the importance of the discipline rings as true today as when Ponti wrote the following at the height of the Italian design phenomenon of the 1950s: "Love architecture, be it ancient or modern. Love it for its fantastic, adventurous and solemn creations; for its inventions; for the abstract, allusive and figurative forms that enchant our spirit and enrapture our thoughts. Love architecture, the stage and support of our lives."

Publication Date: 2003-08-03
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3003