Gio Ponti is a big deal, at least in Italy. Now Taschen, the art and architecture publisher with the surest finger on the industry’s pulse, has deemed the man who designed everything from Milan’s signature skyscraper, the Pirelli Tower, to ocean liner interiors, to what was once the world’s lightest mass-produced chair, worthy of enshrinement in one of its super-sized books. Weighing in at a hefty 572 oversized pages, the volume—Gio Ponti, edited by Karl Kolbitz—aims to be the final say about the designer’s work and importance.
There are two problems with that goal. One is that the book is, like many Taschen products, is very light on the text and heavy on period photographs. Those images come with a certain authenticity and charm, but they reveal the aesthetic biases of when the work was made, emphasizing lighting and the stylish dresses of the era as much as the details of the architecture. The text itself (contributed by Salvatore Licitra, Stefano Casciani, Lisa Licitra Ponti, Brian Kish, and Fabio Marino) is largely hagiographic, offering little social or historical context for the work. Moreover, in its encyclopedic reach, the book does not offer many in-depth views of Ponti’s projects. The editors and publisher chose, on the other hand, to give an inordinate amount of room to his designs for the Italian ocean liners—those interiors appearing in image after repetitive image—and on one or two houses, in particular the ones in Caracas. That might have to do with what archival materials were available, but I suspect it was also because the editors figured that exoticism and luxurious glamour sells.
Then there is the architecture itself. I will just say it: I have never quite understood why Ponti is so revered as an architect. His buildings are quirky at best. The apartment and office structures are attempts to streamline and abstract traditional types by stylizing them with thin, elongated windows and lazy angles. Those elements provide visual interest but no real contribution, as far as I can tell, to the life in or around the buildings. His most famous and largest design, the Pirelli Tower, is a striking object on the Milan skyline, but is neither particularly functional nor in any way responsive to its context. It is a beautiful, thin monolith, impeccably detailed with Ponti’s signature flourishes of elongation and angles, but it nevertheless remains an odd part of the city’s skyline. The recent renovation of the Denver Art Museum’s original home, which Ponti designed towards the end of his life, brings out the luster of its textures and celebrates its castellated forms, but does little to convince me of its intrinsic worth as an art museum.
I feel the same way about most of the furniture and objects Ponti designed. They can all be classified as thin—none more so than the 1957 “Superleggera,” or super-light chair. This still-in-production piece of furniture is a feat of design and engineering, but I have always found it odd-looking when somebody sits on it and not particularly comfortable. Ponti’s silverware has the same tendency to elude gravity, not to mention the hand’s grip, making it look like a sketch of the thing rather than a finished object.
That sense of design as a draft or drawing is perhaps key to why Ponti’s work, despite its general lack of functionality and disregard of functional or aesthetic context, is attractive to so many. There is a gestural quality to it: a sense that the work is evoking something that is not there and that extends beyond the physical form itself—a knife blade soaring into Milan’s sky, for instance, poised to slice a cloud. It is for that reason that I prefer the decorative objects and furnishings Ponti designed to his larger buildings, in which the scale and the structure’s completion tend to limit that promise of something more. Only the Cathedral in Taranto that he designed at the end of his life seems to bring some of that allusion to a habitable scale.
Based on the photographs and drawings in the book, Ponti was perhaps best as an interior designer. I am particularly intrigued by the apartments he designed for himself, which highlight that sense of incompletion: Ponti loved using a colored or patterned plane to suggest something beyond the actual design, the thinning of the edges of walls and angling of approaches pointing to something at the next corner or in the next room. His use of figurative paintings, which were his forte from the beginning of his career, strengthen that illusion of dancing through a space by making us focus on the elongated and swirling figures on the wallpaper or vases strewn around those rooms.
What Gio Ponti had, in other words, was an ability to engage and enliven through design—a quality that, if we can believe the book, was part and parcel of who he was as a person. Stylish, charming, generous, and witty, he was the founding editor of Domus magazine, a contributor to many other publications, and an engaging host, teacher, and dinner companion—all ways his influence extended beyond his design work. Those are qualities and contributions, however, that can be difficult to capture in a book.
Ponti obviously had what the Italians call sprezzatura: that rare mix of wit, elegance, and bravura. He was part of the world of high fashion and embodied a certain kind of Italian style that, through movies and objects like Olivetti typewriters and Vespa scooters, conquered the world in the 1960s.
Note, however, that he never designed any of those objects. He published them, promoted them, and, in some showrooms and ballrooms on ships, created stage sets from them. Now that the impresario has a hefty tome dedicated to his own work, that distinction becomes all too clear.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
