The Pleasures of Ponti

Milan is in the midst of its most successful Triennale--a once-in-three-years show of industrial arts, dating back to 1907. This year 23 countries are participating, and a total turnout of 300,000 visitors is expected. There is plenty to see: Japanese porcelain. Scandinavian furniture, a geodesic dome designed by the U.S.'s R. Buckminster Fuller. But the show's foremost attraction by far, is a one-man pavilion celebrating the effervescent genius of Milan's own Gio Ponti.

At 65, Ponti is perhaps the world's top designer, and the busiest. He put up his own pavilion to display a living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath in which every object is a product of his own imagination. The pavilion walls are of translucent vitreous cement in various colors. Inside are glass bookcases in which the books seem to float on air, tables whose color varies with the angle of view, an austere double bed. Asked to explain some of the items, blocky, bristly Ponti bubblingly obliged:

"Style means good taste. One example of common bad taste is making a double bed too feminine. A bed isn't only a place for voluptuousness. It is a place where you want to sleep soundly, heavily, in contrast with delicacy. It is the place where at times you will be sick, when you want comfort, not refinement. It is the place where you will want to die. when you want majesty, not daintiness. What woman worthy of the name wants to see her man sleep in lace?"

A Bath Is a Bath. "Good taste." for Ponti, evidently has as much to do with sense as with sensibility. "Design." he says, "must have style that is a style of its own, dictated by its function--not a style copied from the past. A frequent error is designing a bathroom too luxuriously. A bath is a bath, and not a luxury. Everything in the bathroom must work perfectly. When I wash my hands, my two forearms converge towards the middle of the basin, and what I want is not the vision of a rectangle, but a place to put down my soap and nailbrush--not up by my elbows but where my hands are going to be. So I design basins to converge towards the taps, the widest portion of the sides being close to the taps."

With the help of his wife, his daughters and a staff of twelve. Ponti not only designs everything from basins to buildings, but also puts out an arts and architecture magazine called Dornus (Latin for home), which has an international circulation of 40,000. "Father's enthusiasm is contagious," his daughter Letitia says, explaining how it all gets done. "If he is thinking of a new water basin, not one of us could just sit down and forget water basins. You just have to set your mind to what father is thinking." This in itself is a formidable assignment, for Ponti generates ideas from the moment he bounds out of bed at 6 a.m. and shouts for his usual breakfast of smoked beef and mineral water.

Having made a hit at the Triennale, Ponti last week was deep in a globe-girdling series of new projects: a villa for the Shah of Iran, another villa in Caracas, an auditorium for the new TIME and LIFE building in Manhattan, judging an architectural competition in Karachi, an elaborate "Ministry of Industrial Development" for Baghdad. His Baghdad project will have distinguished company: the Iraqi government has invited France's Le Corbusier, Finland's Alvar Aalto, and Frank Lloyd Wright to design related buildings. At home in Milan, a Ponti-designed skyscraper for the Pirelli rubber company is now under construction. Since steel is expensive in Italy. Ponti used reinforced concrete instead, suspending the whole construction from four tapering concrete columns. Judging from the model (see cut), the tall glass fagade will have an elegance reminiscent of Venice's Ca' d'Oro and the Doge's Palace.

Walls Can Look Vegetable. One reason why Venetian palaces tend to look as evanescent as clouds is that they rise from their own reflections in the canals. With his Pirelli building, Ponti achieved a similar effect of lightness in a highly original way: he tapered the skyscraper's long sides together, giving it a cross section close to that of a double-headed ax. The building is slim and airy from every angle. Better yet, in an age when most office buildings look like sections out of a mold, which could be extended indefinitely up or sideways at the whim of the builder, Ponti's skyscraper has the quality of being independent and self-contained--a quality essential to all great architecture.

"Once walls carried something," Ponti says. "They supported the weight, and so they had to be large and powerful. But now walls are made just to enclose a space. Where weight was taken off the wall in the past, the Gothic style developed. It is likely that in the future, walls will twist like trees and be as translucent as glass. We shall pass from the mineral wall to the aerial, vegetable-looking wall." With Ponti in the picture, that may happen sooner than expected.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.