What a wonderful photo: the boy has dressed up. The good shoes, the double-breasted suit. A fly. With holy earnestness he looks at the chair, which he lifts with just one finger. The chair is called “Superleggera”, the super light one. It weighs just 1.7 kilograms.
The “Superleggera” comes from Gio Ponti and is now in all relevant design museums around the world. In the recently published monograph on the Italian designer and architect, a rather brief chapter is devoted to the chair. That fits, because the chair is not a show-off piece of furniture. And what is relevant – from the roots of the chair in the Italian furniture tradition of the 18th century to its finalization for the Cassina company in 1957 – can be found, the illustrations are also rich.
Bold coffee machine
Gio Ponti is one of the most important designers of the 20th century. Starting in Italy, he developed a kind of modernity that actually cannot be grasped under this term at all. The respective time can always be recognized in it, but it never submits to this time. Ponti’s early ceramics in particular internalized antiquity in terms of form and choice of motifs. But the focus was always forward. In 1952, Ponti and his colleague Alberto Rosselli designed a car: a bold concept with a self-supporting body, too angular for the time. The design for Alfa Romeo disappeared in the drawer. When Saab developed the iconic Saab 900 25 years later, the designers ended up with a similar shape; that they knew the Ponti sketches seems unlikely.
It is amazing that a really detailed reference work on Ponti is only now appearing, but it is coming at just the right time. The very thick book, which is even delivered with its own table if necessary, of course one by Gio Ponti – you know this kind of thing from bags, but you also know the price, the fun costs 3,000 euros – is just calling out to us Germans, who are we like that are proud of our design heritage, oppose something important. One: “Relax yourself. Have the courage to use color! ”Perhaps also:“ Please don’t take all of this seriously, or rather: take it seriously, but don’t demonize any eclecticism. ”It may also be due to our insatiable longing for Italy, but after three years in which if the Bauhaus is celebrated and examined, the view to the south has something liberating; it’s like visiting a candy store after years of light diet. Whereby: Ponti actually designed a candy store, the “Dulciora Candy Store” (Milan, 1949).
Gio Ponti was born in Milan on November 18, 1891. From 1913 he studied architecture there, graduating in 1921 after an interruption due to the First World War. Just two years later he was appointed artistic director of the Richard-Ginori porcelain factory; another four years later he opens his first office. What follows are many markings on the map of Italian design. During the 30s, 40s and 50s he designed countless buildings, including residential buildings, institutions, but also the iconic Pirelli skyscraper in Milan and the Denver Art Museum. He develops “La Cornuta”, a bold coffee machine for the catering industry that looks as if it is about to turn onto the next racetrack. And by the way, he invents the magazine Domus also the most important architecture magazine in the world!
After the Second World War, it mainly gave its face to a quiet, international luxury that characterizes the second half of this volume: There are the offices of Alitalia and the interior of numerous ocean liner, especially the transatlantic ship Andrea Doria, who sank in 1956. There is the Villa Planchart in Caracas, designed in 1955. Open and light, beyond classic spatial planning, and just as the house seems to float on the hill above the Venezuelan capital, the roof floats over the house. And then there is the “Parco Dei Principi”. The hotel in Sorrento, southern Italy, was designed by Ponti in the early 1960s as a total work of art, in which every curtain and tile was given the same care as the actual building. The book dedicates 14 pages to this hotel, which is still in operation and in its original state, each of these pages is a pleasure.
In this chapter, Ponti is quoted with a sentence that is definitely representative of his way of working: “Give someone a 20 x2 0 square, and even if people have been coming up with endless designs for centuries, there is always room for a new design, for your own design. There will never be a final design. “
The Ponti book does not measure 20 by 20, but a luxurious 36 by 36 centimeters. It weighs five and a half kilograms, which is more than three of the “Superleggera” chairs mentioned at the beginning. The astonishing: Nevertheless, it is by no means one of the so-called coffee table volumes, which are only used for representation purposes, but is also voluminous in terms of content.
Editor Karl Kolbitz leads the reader knowledgeably and entertainingly into the discourses of the time, shows Ponti’s influences from the Vienna Secession to William Morris (and gives them a big “but”), examines his relationship to Italian fascism as well as that to Industrial design and to the most diverse currents of modernity. Sometimes the pictures say louder than the words, when we see office furniture, for example, where Pontis lamps and furniture stand harmoniously next to a cantilever chair by Bauhaus builder Mart Stam.
Gio Ponti Karl Kolbitz (Hrsg.), Texte: Salvatore Licitra, Stefano Casciani, Lisa Licitra Ponti, Brian Kish, Fabio Marino Taschen Verlag 2021, 572 S., 200 €
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