Gio Ponti Had a Lot of Tricks Up His Sleeve

Gio Ponti seems to encapsulate the phrase Dal cucchiaio alla città—"from the spoon to the city"—a saying first famously set in ink by the Italian architect Ernesto Rogers in 1933's The Athens Charter. Rogers’s quip, published thanks to Le Corbusier, described his particular cohort of Milanese architects active between the First and Second World Wars. They were a prolific bunch, known for their dexterity, approaching the design of a teaspoon with the same conviction as they did an entire city.

Ponti, the architect, designer, and writer who did much to shape the course of 20th-century Italian design, lives up to the broad swath of disciplines this maxim covers. From the pages of his magazine, Domus, to the skyline of Milan, Ponti’s influence was immeasurably vast. Which is precisely why a new exhibition at Rome’s MAXXI museum seeks to shed light on the polymath's lesser-known feats.

“We wanted to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of Ponti’s work,” cocurator and architectural historian Maristella Casciato tells AD PRO of the exhibition, "Gio Ponti: Loving Architecture." “We know much better Ponti the designer . . . but much less attention has been paid to Ponti the architect.”

Case in point, a blockbuster exhibition staged last year at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which delved into the design side of his career. MAXXI’s new show takes a different approach, narrowing in on his architectural legacy instead. Dusting off materials gathered from the University of Parma’s Gio Ponti Archives—bequeathed to the institution by the architect himself—the exhibition features sketches, architectural drawings, photographs, models, materials, design objects, and even personal letters of correspondence lovingly effaced with Ponti’s playful doodles.

“The idea of the exhibition was to recognize the continuity in Ponti’s work,” Casciato explains of the exhibition's concept, which organizes the gallery into eight thematic clusters. “There were certain ideas he developed within the various contexts he worked in and throughout the many years he was active.”

Become a Member

Don't miss the AD PRO-exclusive workshop—Photo Finish: How to Showcase Your Project

Bouncing between themes, the exhibition meanders through Ponti's prolific career. Starting from the domestic and ending with monumental, the show tracks the development of Ponti’s oeuvre, from his home on Milan’s Via Dezza to the Pirelli skyscraper, the Scuola di Matematica in Rome, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Stockholm, the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Sorrento, Italy, and all the way to the Denver Art Museum—one of his last works, which was completed in 1971.

“Conceptually, Denver is one of his strongest buildings,” Casciato says of the U.S. museum, which is situated in a cluster within the exhibition titled "Architecture as Crystal." A hand-drawn elevation shows the building’s faceted façade unraveling like a ribbon, emphasizing Ponti’s career-long preoccupation with the crystalline form as the perfect architectural shape. “It’s a closed form, but it’s still extremely flexible,” continues Casciato, describing the building’s layout. “Being able to study the drawings gives us so much insight into his process.”

Detailed drawings and documentation of the 1964 Ministerial Buildings in Islamabad brilliantly highlight one of Ponti’s lesser-known works. The project was planned in the wake of the partition of India and Pakistan, as the latter was still defining its new capital’s infrastructure. “When we opened those folders, we found all of the plans for the ministry,” Casciato says of the discovery. “Each with the same rigorous attention to the façade, the details, the working space, and the connection with the landscape, which was then just fields stretching out toward the Himalayas. Finding these papers so intact was a shock.”

Housed in the top floor gallery of the Zaha Hadid–designed MAXXI, Ponti’s classically influenced rationalism makes for an interesting foil for the late architect’s concrete curves. Indeed, a sinuous, typically Hahid-ian walkway delivering visitors between floors to the gallery’s entranceway has been plastered with a reproduction of Ponti's signature Giallo Fantastico laminate flooring, an oozing, lavalike pattern in yellow and black that popped up in projects such as the now-demolished Time-Life auditorium in New York. It's a compelling fusion of the two architects’ visual calling cards—and a fitting tribute to Italy’s architectural history.