At the dedication of Taranto Cathedral in 1970, its 79-year-old architect, Gio Ponti, gave a speech. His words are not well remembered, but his family kept a recording of what preceded it: 10 minutes of applause, like “thunder”. This was a figure who, according to some anti-modernist mythologies, was supposed not to exist – a modern architect beloved by the users of his building.
His magic was charm. It was present in this Italian cathedral’s openwork tower, a stack of portals, as Ponti put it, “accessible only to the eye and the wind: a facade for the air”. It was his wish that vegetation would grow over the building, to which locals responded by bringing plant pots and flowers to the opening. The same quality was present 50 years earlier, in the colourful vases he created for the Richard Ginori ceramics company, which made classical antiquity seem as fresh and alive as a person just stepped from the sea. His letters glow with charm – 99,900 of them over his life, to 6,400 recipients – in which his handwriting is apt to blossom into drawings: hands, faces, clouds, creatures, abstract rhythms of lines and ribbons of colour.
Accounts of Ponti generally have to include lists, for example of the things he touched with his design: villas and churches, cruise ship interiors, chairs, bathroom fittings, scenography and costumes for opera, an espresso machine, airline offices, hotels, textiles, a faculty of nuclear physics, a faculty of mathematics, the headquarters of a chemicals conglomerate, tiles for floors and walls, stained glass windows, knives and forks. Or of the materials he used – stainless steel (for example), aluminium, bronze, majolica, multicoloured marble, paint, plants, mosaic, leather, fur, glass, burr walnut, lacquered newspaper, papier-mache, old master prints transferred on to plastic laminates. Or the places where he worked: Denver, Islamabad, Hong Kong, New York, Tehran, Caracas, Baghdad, Eindhoven, Stockholm, as well as his native Italy.
He has his share of masterpieces, such as the lissom Pirelli tower in his home city of Milan, which rises next to the monstrous heap of stone that is the city’s central railway station like a Greek goddess born from the carcass of a giant. His Superleggera chair, in which wood performs like aluminium, so light that a child can lift it with one finger, is a classic. His Villa Planchart in Caracas is a tropical dream of air, colour, pattern, greenery, coolth and volume – “a big butterfly poised on the hillside”, said Ponti – where the heads of antelopes were composed into veneered wall units alongside graceful ceramics and a then state-of-the-art TV screen. But his greatest creation was the atmosphere he conjured across all his works: free, light, luminous. Charm – or to use a word he liked, enchantment – was the immaterial substance that joined all these disparate elements together.
For all of which achievement Ponti has been relatively under-published. He produced one book of his work in his lifetime, plus a poetical-graphical essay called Amate l’Archittetura, while his late daughter Lisa Licitra Ponti brought out a monograph after his death. Now the German artbook impresario Taschen has set out to celebrate his achievements in emphatic fashion, with a 572-page, £200 encapsulation of Ponti’s long career. It weighs 5.67kg, which is 3.34 times the 1.7kg Superleggera chair. There’s an irony here, that a prince of lightness such as Ponti should be remembered with something so massive, but it’s hard to do justice to his output in any other way.
The book is the result of a collaboration between Ponti’s grandson Salvatore Licitra and Karl Kolbitz, an editor, art director and former assistant and muse to Wolfgang Tillmans. It has texts by the writer and curator Stefano Casciani and Lisa Licitra Ponti. Years in the making, it draws on several sources of material, including the official Gio Ponti archive in his former Milan office. Its aim, says Salvatore Licitra, is to assemble “a thousand kaleidoscopic Pontian inventions” into “nothing short of the best book possible”.
It successfully captures Ponti’s spirit, with imagery that ranges from his delicate drawings to family photographs to images of his towers and city blocks. A certain glamour emanates: Anna Magnani, Joan Crawford and Tennessee Williams enjoying themselves on a Ponti-designed ship; a cocktail party in a Milanese apartment of his design, in which the architect appears, Hitchcock-like, in his own creation, mixing drinks in the well-formed bar.
The book shows a creator influenced by many currents of 20th-century art and architecture, but swept away by none of them. He borrowed abstraction and technical innovation from the Bauhaus, the power of space and light from Le Corbusier, oneiric suggestiveness from Dada and surrealism. His work can have the simplicity of a Morandi still life and the playfulness of Paul Klee or Saul Steinberg.
He was never polemical. He saw no schisms between modernity and antiquity, or between mass production and craft. “I am very interested in the splendour of the past,” Licitra recalls him saying, “but I am much more interested in the splendour of the future.” He could design the pneumatic internal post system for an office building as beautifully as a classical vase. He also created giallo fantastico, a kind of rubber flooring manufactured by Pirelli, in which different colours flow, lava-like or Pollock-like, into swirling patterns. Every piece is different, such that the material is, as Kolbitz puts it, “industrial but unique”.
Although his character must have been strong, he rarely tried to get his way by force of will alone – that charm, again. Another Ponti list is that of his allies and collaborators: the designer Piero Fornasetti, the artists Giorgio de Chirico and Lucio Fontana, the architect and erotomane Carlo Mollino, the great architect Lina Bo Bardi, the craftspeople and engineers who made his works possible, the many people he brought together through his editorship of the magazines Domus and Stile. Generosity and openness rather than a will to power was the basis of his success.
You can see a related spirit in a circular table designed by Ponti, whose glass top is supported on a metal grid. The vertical faces of the grid are painted in different colours, which means that its appearance changes as you move around it. The viewer, rather than the designer, is put at the centre of the experience. He realised this quality in his architecture too – many of his drawings explore the eye-height vistas of future users from different points in the future building. For Ponti, most things were communication, and drawing was the medium through which it was transmitted into buildings and objects.
What might be called his people skills helped him to navigate the politics of his time. Having witnessed horrors as an officer in the first world war, he then spent the first two decades of his career under fascist rule. Which, although he avoided becoming one of Mussolini’s architectural cheerleaders, required some accommodations to be made with the regime. He kept enough distance that he could then emerge from the further horrors of the second world war as an emblem of the new Italy, of which graceful modern design was a defining feature.
The main criticisms of Ponti centre on his willingness to adapt, his avoidance of confrontation, his reluctance to take stands on the big issues of his day. He was unapologetically bourgeois. He can occasionally be a tad twee or fey. But what he won with his diplomacy was the freedom to create in ways that could reach many people. He gave meaning to the slightly plodding statement of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, that architecture is about “commodity, firmness and delight”. Ponti knew about delight.
