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M&C 13
Gio Ponti’s flat in
Milan, via Dezza 49
(reconstruction)
Montecatini offices
in Milan; 1936-38
(reconstruction)
Armchair D.156.3
designed by Gio Ponti,
Molteni Museum;
re-edition Molteni
Heritage Collection
2017.
Gio Ponti in Paris
#MolteniGroup
by Salvatore Licitra
“Where are we going? From heaviness to lightness,
opaqueness to trasparency, from corruptible to incorruptible,
conglomerate to unity” Gio Ponti, 1957
Pirelli Tower model,
Milan, 1956-60.
Molteni&C Lounge
displaying Gio Ponti’s
Heritage Collection.
Visitors to the Tutto Ponti – Gio Ponti Archi-designer exhibition at the Paris MAD,
a rich review of Ponti’s works, will discover the wealth of talent and skills of this
many-sided father of Italian arts and culture. The chronological pathway of
the exhibition illustrates the sixty years of Ponti’s intense creative fervour, with
his work representing all the cultural themes, technological advances, passions
and inventions of those years.
Starting from the 1920s, we see Ponti as the refined decorator of Richard Ginori
ceramics, but at the same time the attentive promoter and innovator of that
company’s policies, relaunching its profile internationally, presenting it at the
international exhibition of the arts in Paris in 1925 and winning the exhibition’s
prize with his own ceramic creations. Right from this first major undertaking,
Ponti’s creativity was part and parcel of his attention to communicating
the project and defining the guidelines that were to orient the business of
the company that he was involved in. This combination of Ponti the creator
and Ponti the director/promoter is perhaps the key to understanding the man.
The main instrument for Ponti’s dual commitment as both the creator and
the promoter of cultural policy was Domus, the magazine he founded in 1923
and for which he was always present, except for his brief but impassioned
interlude with Stile from 1941 to 1947.
In the early 1930s, along with glass industrialist Luigi Fontana, he designed
refined glass pieces and decorative mirrors, and persuaded Fontana to set up
Fontana Arte, which went on to enjoy remarkable success under his art direction.
In those years, Ponti designed elegant collector’s items produced by skilled
cabinet-makers while, at the same time, involving La Rinascente in the creation
of the Domus Nova collection and in showcasing industrially produced
furniture in the department store.
Towards the end of the 1930s and right up to the outbreak of war, Ponti’s work
reflected another of the constants that inspired his endeavours throughout his
career: attention to Italian arts. Campigli, Severini, Martini, Funi and many other
artists would be involved in Ponti’s projects in Padua. Post war, in his furnishings
for ocean liners and in numerous interior designs, we see the rise of artist-artisans
such as De Poli, Zortea, Fornasetti, Melandri, Hettner, or artists of the calibre
of Melotti, Altara, Fontana, Munari. In Ponti’s architectural works and in
the composition of his interiors, art provides a counterpoint to architecture
– it accompanies him and marks the rhythm of his perception of spaces.
Lastly, Ponti’s exquisitely refined furnishings, his beautiful ceramic surfaces
or the numerous items of silver, textiles and glass that accompany his creative
career, testify to his passion and curiosity for Italian artistic craftsmanship,
which he used enthusiastically in his designs, promoted and represented
in the Triennale exhibitions, and in the pages of Domus and Stile. To conclude
the overview of Ponti’s career and of the exhibition at the MAD Paris, which
I have had the pleasure of illustrating, we cannot forget his varied and significant
commitment to conceiving and expressing the new cultural field of industrial
design that has been so enduringly successful since the post-war period.
Today, Ponti’s work – his legacy – satisfies all contemporary demands
and needs. The selection of furnishings presented by Molteni&C, in close
cooperation with the Gio Ponti Archives, effectively represents Gio Ponti’s
entire creative career.In fact, in the crucial intersections of the exhibition,
we rediscover the pieces that characterize the Heritage Collection,
which incorporates re-editions of Ponti’s designs.
The Anticorodal chair that Ponti designed for Montecatini in 1936
(now re-edited by Molteni and appropriately named “Montecatini”),
is on display in the MAD exhibition in a reconstruction dedicated to the
building and its furnishings, which Gio Ponti saw as an essential complement
to the design of the spaces and an expression of his precise attention to
ergonomics. In the reconstruction of Ponti’s apartment in via Dezza we find
three important items of furniture that inspired the Heritage Collection:
the low coffee table that Gio Ponti designed for his home (D.555.1), and
the armchair and the wall-mounted bookcase that featured in his apartment
(D.153.1 and D.357.2). These models admirably summarize both that blend
of architecture and design that is Ponti’s signature, and also his ideas for real
industrial design: mass produced, affordable, expressive and understandable.
To explain the need for these re-editions, it was a question of recovering
those ideas that could not be fully satisfied in Ponti’s day – neither in the
sense of real mass production, nor in the conception and use of the interiors.
Today, Ponti’s ideas still express the possibility of industry giving substance
to and satisfying contemporary requirements, from functional
and economic ones to the need for protagonism in the use of the spaces
provided by architecture.
Close to the variegated and surprising display of Ponti chairs, we come
across the 811 armchair (D.156.3), a model halfway between artisanal
production and the first industrial solution, which unites a finely
modelled wooden structure to a seat structured on Pirelli elastic straps.
Last but not least, we find the “small-seated chair” next to the collection
of wheeled furniture of the Apta Series, of which it was the forerunner,
and which was Ponti’s idea in the 1970s for a versatile and affordable
building, furnished with light, colorful and foldable furniture.
The Paris exhibition also showcases Ponti’s architecture. The residential
buildings, houses, offices, villas and hotels, always designed with a focus
on their ability to accommodate their “inhabitants”, to express and interpret
a lifestyle, to be built around the perceptions and glances of those who
would live in those spaces or who would appreciate the volumes as they
walked around the city.
This aptitude is what enabled Ponti to blend, in a single creative act,
thedesign of objects, furniture, decorative objects, interiors, volumes
in an inexhaustible whirl of references. His work became, in the opinion
of people the world over, an expression of and testament to the wide-ranging
creativity that is attributed to Italy.
