Giovanni
(1891-1979)
One of the most important figures in 20th-century Italian design, Ponti was also an influential writer, teacher, and practising architect. He designed across a wide range of design fields, from interiors to furniture and product design, acknowledging the significance of craft traditions alongside the development of a modern aesthetic in a long and distinguished career. After graduating in architecture from Milan Polytechnic in 1921, he established a design studio in Milan with Emilio Lancia and Mino Foicchi. He exhibited at the Monza Biennale of Decorative Arts in 1923, the year in which he began working as artistic director at the ceramics manufacturer Richard Ginori. The company was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels. Although a number of Ponti's designs drew on classical precedents, under his direction the company also brought out its first catalogue of Modern Art Pottery, reflecting his concern for quality in mass production. During these years he also designed low-cost furniture for La Rinascente department store and the first of a number of glass designs for Paolo Venini in Murano in 1928. In 1930 he was appointed as artistic director to the Fontana Arte company, designing a number of modern lights. He also played an important role in the development of the Monza Biennali and ensuing Milan Triennali that, from the early 1930s, provided important national and international arenas for the exhibition of modern design. At the 1933 Triennale Ponti's and Carlo Pagano's interior designs for the Breda electric train ETR 200 were displayed; in 1936 he exhibited ‘A Demonstrative Dwelling’. After the Second World War Ponti's work attracted considerable attention across Europe and the United States, his work being promoted in New York by W. Singer & Sons from 1950. Reflecting wider post-war interest in organic form in design (see Eames, Charles; Saarinen, Eero), he produced a widely admired coffee machine for La Pavoni in 1948 and a number of sculptural sanitary ware designs for Ideal Standard in 1953. Other celebrated Ponti designs of the 1950s included the Leggera (1952) and the Superleggera (1957) chairs for Cassina, both of which reveal the ways in which Ponti married craft traditions to a modern outlook. He also designed furniture for Arflex and Knoll, flatware for Krupp Italiana and Christofle, lighting for Arredoluce and Artemide, textiles for Fede Cheti, and glass for Venini.
He was also a prolific architect of note, with a variety of commissions that spanned houses and housing developments, university and office buildings, government buildings and department stores. His most significant buildings were perhaps the Montecatini Building in Milan, completed in 1938, for which he also designed interiors, fittings, and fixtures, and the dominant 1956 Pirelli Tower, also in Milan, in conjunction with Arturo Danusso and Pier Luigi Nervi.
However, Ponti was also influential in terms of his extensive critical and theoretical written outputs. The most important of these was undoubtedly the Domus magazine, which he founded in 1928. His editorial voice was heard through its pages in many different phases of 20th-century Italian design, his terms of office spanning much of his professional career (1928-41, 1948-79). Whilst away from Domus from 1941 to 1947 he edited Stile, another magazine that he founded and which reflected his personal ideas and concerns, as well as articles proposing models for living in the reconstruction period. Between 1941 and 1943 he also contributed to the fashion periodical Bellezza. He taught at Milan Polytechnic from 1936 to 1961 and won many awards during his career, including the Compasso d'Oro Grand Prix in 1956.
