Gio Ponti

Gio Ponti was born in Milan in 1891 and graduated in architecture there in 1921. His practice would move between buildings, interiors, furniture, ceramics and publishing, but architecture remained a central framework for his work.^[1,2,3]

Appointed artistic director of Richard-Ginori in 1923, Ponti designed ceramics that connected decorative art with the maker’s production. The Ginori manufactory and Ponti received a Grand Prix at the 1925 Paris exposition.^[1,4]

Ponti founded Domus in 1928 and directed it until 1941. After editing Stile from 1941 to 1947, he returned to Domus in 1948 and remained its director until 1979. The magazines gave him a place to circulate ideas about architecture, furniture and the decorative arts alongside his studio work.^[5,6]

Designed for Cassina in 1957, the 699 Superleggera turns a chair into a study of structure and material. The Superleggera has an ash frame, a beech seat frame and legs with an 18-millimetre triangular section; its design combined Ponti’s research with the maker’s experimentation.^[7]

Ponti’s buildings include Milan’s first Montecatini office building and the Pirelli skyscraper of 1956–60. From 1952 he worked with engineer Antonio Fornaroli and architect Alberto Rosselli as Studio Ponti Fornaroli Rosselli. His projects of the same decade also included Villa Planchart in Caracas.^[1,8]

Ponti’s range becomes clearer when scale changes in front of the reader. Domus carried ideas across architecture and decorative arts; the 699 Superleggera makes one construction problem small enough to examine. The 699 Superleggera has a triangular leg section of 18 millimetres, an ash frame and a beech seat frame. The number refers to that leg section, not the chair’s overall thickness. A photograph of an exact 699 leg would make the slender structure legible; a building photograph can then show that Ponti’s work did not stop at furniture. Keep Cassina’s manufacturing experimentation in the credit: this object is not a solitary sketch turned directly into production.^[1,7]