A new illustrated book on the work of multi-talented Gio Ponti has been published recently. It covers the Italian architect’s and designer’s complete oeuvre. Ponti’s core philosophy of modernism saw architecture as a representational object and a “self-luminous” stage for his humanistic art of living and boundless creativity. It is indeed no exaggeration to state that Ponti, who was born in 1891, shaped the appearance of modern Italy.
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For almost sixty years Gio Ponti, whose real name was Giovanni Ponti, designed the world with the greatest energy: Elegant skyscrapers, vases, tiles, armchairs, tables, chairs, villas, cutlery, ship interiors, wall mosaics, sculptures, drawings … One could continue this even further and yet not capture the oeuvre of Gio Ponti in its entirety: In his designs one can find all the styles of the 20th century, in some cases he even anticipated trends. He was a poet, designer, industrial architect, architect and interior designer all at the same time. Thus, his concept of art is to be understood very broadly since he always went beyond the respective categories and so created a complex creative universe with his designs, in which upon closer inspection one also recognizes a clear, unified vision.
Gio Ponti and his world of interiors, art objects, furniture, lighting fixtures, building plans, …
The German TASCHEN Verlag has now taken this as an opportunity to document the exceptional architect and his work in a massive book and the most comprehensive overview of his oeuvre to date. The book was produced in collaboration with the Gio Ponti Archive in Milan. As readers turn the pages, they are immersed in a world of interiors, art objects, furniture, lighting fixtures, building plans, hotel entrances, cruise ships, and much more. Even the book cover itself is a reference to a well-known floor covering by Ponti from one of his most famous designs, the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan.
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Italy at Ponti’s time: progressive, self-confident and future-oriented
The richly illustrated XXL book with about 136 projects shows Italy at Ponti’s time: progressive, self-confident and future-oriented. Like no other, Ponti, who was born in 1891, shaped the appearance of modern Italy. Berlin art director Karl Kolbitz has brought the works together in a detailed collection with illustrations of buildings, projects and plans, so that the book allows the viewer to float with ease through perhaps the most exciting times for design in the 20th century: Enthusiasm for technology and creativity come together with art and design history. It is also particularly noteworthy that each object appears in the original context in which Ponti originally created it. In this way previously unpublished materials and unposed photographs allow new dialogues between well-known masterpieces and the less famous, but no less lesser-known works, revealing new insights into his elusive life.
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Gio Ponti and his core philosophy of modernism
But who was Gio Ponti anyway, or rather, who or what was he not? In the booklet of the illustrated book one can find some answers to this question: In the essay by Gio Ponti’s grandson Salvatore Licitra, founder of the Gio Ponti Archive and curator of the exhibitions “Gio Ponti Archi-Designer” (Museè des Arts Decoratifs in Paris 2018) and “Gio Ponti” Loving Architecture” (MAXXI Rome 2019), as well while reading the interview with his daughter Lisa Licitra Ponti, who died in 2019 and through a detailed biographical text, written by Stefano Casciani, longtime editor-in-chief of DOMUS Magazine, readers will get a good insight into Gio Ponti’s work and person. He was a contemporary of the Bauhäusler, but unlike Walter Gropius for example, he was not a purist; the austerity of the latter’s architectural language was too boring and somewhat narrow-minded for him to see in it a new design. For him, both were important throughout his whole life: clear structure and decorative elements. He disliked the idea that only one of these should apply. His core philosophy of modernism therefore also saw architecture as a representational object and a “self-luminous” stage for his humanistic art of living and boundless creativity.
Ponti loved colors such as blue, tan, and yellow, and he had a weakness for complex and iridescent surfaces as well as for the play of light and shadow on a façade. He always worked according to the principle of just not letting boredom arise in the designs.
He simply followed his “flow”
Gio Ponti is generally seen as a trailblazer of modernism, but this is not entirely accurate and only represents an attempt to put his extensive body of work into one big bracket. It seems better though to assume that Ponti did not want to create any (own) styles or models at all, but simply followed his “flow”, as one would say today. This is particularly evident in his best-known building, the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan with its streamlined basic form, the almost floating roof and the construction almost without supporting pillars. This design brought Ponti worldwide fame, and he afterwards was commissioned to design everything from museums and churches to department stores.
For Ponti, the future of architecture was closely linked to communication: He founded DOMUS, a magazine that is still renowned today, and curated STILE – all of which were opportunities for him to share his interests with a large audience.
The book “Gio Ponti” is released as an Art Edition in addition to the limited XXL edition that is also limited to 1000 copies. The book, published by TASCHEN, is available here.
Rome – the eternal city. To architect Chiara Dorbolò the Italian capital is anything but eternal. On the contrary, its unique character is the result of a sometimes violent juxtaposition of different and transient identities: The authoritarian and the rebellious, the formal and the spontaneous, the new and the old, the devoted and the careless. In times of the coronavirus a new identity has arisen and another vanished: The empty and the overcrowded. In a way, the absence of urban life brings Rome back to its promised eternity.
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Last weeks’ footage of Rome has a confounding familiarity to it. Its streets emptied by the government response to the pandemic, the eternal city seems to have finally honoured its reputation, suspended in a timeless state devoid of human life. Yet, the photos of the Spanish Steps, one of the city’s most famous tourist attractions, only depict the final stage of a process already started in 2016, when the monumental stairway was cleaned as part of a costly Bulgari-funded operation. After the marble was returned to its original white, some suggested fencing off the area off and locking it overnight to avoid a quick return to old habits and dirt. The proposal was rejected, but then in June 2019 the municipality issued a ban on sitting, eating, or drinking on the Spanish Steps and other monumental stairways. While policemen monitored the steps, whistling at incredulous tourists, Roman intellectuals were divided between those in favour of protecting the monuments and those who considered the ban an overly authoritarian measure. This coming summer the debate will not arise again.
“The city centre has become an open-air museum, where speculation has gradually forced out local residents and activities.”
Until last year Rome was the main tourist destination in a country that relies heavily on tourism for its gross domestic product. In the effort to monetise its historical heritage, the city has faced the same difficulties as other European tourist hotspots such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, and London. The city centre has become an open-air museum, where speculation has gradually forced out local residents and activities. A common example is Campo de’ Fiori, the famous square where the 17th-century philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake as a heretic. The only important square in Rome without a church, it was historically associated with the tension between Catholicism and secularism. It was a meeting place for hippies in the ‘60s and feminists in the ‘70s, and later it became very popular among foreign students and professionals (mostly American) in Rome. A couple of decades ago, despite the already numerous tourists, and the chaos often wrought by football fans on weekend nights, the area was still home to a lot of permanent residents. Every morning, they would stroll the market stalls set up at dawn by farmers coming from the city’s outskirts. Now the market is still there, but no one is doing their grocery shopping there. Produce has been mostly replaced by souvenirs, fruit salads to go, and local delicacies. The clochards, artists and activists who used to populate the square have given way to weekend travellers and tourism workers; shops have turned into restaurants and bars, and apartments into short-stay accommodations.
“Have Romans given up on their city centre?”
As the tourist area expands, a similar process is affecting other, not so central neighbourhoods as well. In Monti and Pigneto, for example, local movements are now recognising and strongly opposing gentrification. A notable example is the Ex SNIA, an artificial lake born from a real estate mishap and then reclaimed by the neighbourhood as a public asset. And yet, cases of angered residents fighting speculation in central areas are quite rare. For the most part, opposition to gentrification in the city centre stems from intellectuals who strive to save specific cultural sites rather than social movements opposing a broad urban phenomenon. In a city where the boundary between the centre and the periphery is far from being clear-cut, newer neighbourhoods’ social fabric seems to reflect a stronger identification with the urban context. Have Romans given up on their city centre? Probably not.
“Allowing the city to coexist with tourism without losing herself in it.”
We just believe the identity of the city to be immortal. With our special kind of cynicism, we dismiss every change as temporary and insignificant, in the face of what the city has experienced in its almost 3000 years of life. But the eternal city is not eternal. On the contrary, its unique character is the result of the sometimes violent juxtaposition of different and transient identities: The authoritarian and the rebellious, the formal and the spontaneous, the new and the old, the devoted and the careless. This complexity, rather than the white marble of the Spanish Steps, is what needs to be protected − and not from an invasion by ill-behaved tourists but from the speculative, extractive and toxic relationship that tied them to the city. Perhaps the relaunch of the tourist sector that will inevitably follow the end of this pandemic can be used to set the course straight, allowing the city to coexist with tourism without losing herself in it.
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Chiara Dorbolò is an independent architect and researcher. She studied in Rome and in Amsterdam and currently works as a contributing editor to Failed Architecture. She teaches architectural theory and practice at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam.
Read this Metropolis Explained and other articles in topos 111.
Every year in September a Summer School for students from all over the world is accompanying the “I Maestri del Paessagio” event in Bergamo.
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Master Plan for Parco Ovest
This year the task of the summer school was to design the 12.5 hectares large area of the Parco Ovest in Bergamo. Referred to the design guidelines of the project one important aim of the park is “to realize an important and useful initiative for the overall growth of the landscape culture in Bergamo and Italy.” The newly planned park should be “a good mix” of both a public park implemented into a “peripheral urban context” and an agronomic park including “experimental university research” as well as components attracting visitors and tourists.
The main topic of the nine days workshop from 13th to 21st of September was to develop a master plan based on a strong conceptual approach. On this basis three different projects have been worked out.
The summer school 2017 has deliberately created three very different concepts for the new Parco Ovest in Bergamo. Following a leading idea, each of them shows the potentials of the place. Therefore, the workshop and its results can be seen as a successful starting point of an ongoing process. Now, a further analysis of the project area is needed as well as a deeper design research. The three concepts are representing a promising base for the next steps:
Soundscape
The general design approach of the project considers the existing potentials like topography, vistas to Bergamo Alta or water bodies as well as existing challenges like the presence of important infrastructure elements such as the highway in the south, the railway in the west and the airport ‘Orio al Serio’ in the southeast. Based on an analysis of Bergamo’s wider green structure, the concept proposes to connect the park with the surroundings, respectively with the ecological corridor and agricultural park in the west of the railway embankment.
Within this green system, the outstanding characteristic of the new park is its function as a soundscape. The designers propose to shape the noise protection embankments along the highway and along the railway as sound waves. In this southern part of the park, additional noise of the aeroplanes has a high impact. By contrast, the concept suggests for the northern part of the park to make the sound of trees – for instance caused by inner tensions – audible for users and visitors.
Team Soundscape: Stephen Flack (Australia), Gloria Gusmaroli (Italy), Viviana Lavermicocca (Italy), Farzana Sharmin (Bangladesh), Maria Sokolova (Russia), Andrea Volpato (Italy)
Parco Sottosopra
The main design inspiration for the ‘Parco Sottosopra’ is the (partly existing) topography. Between the five entrances/accesses to the park area – two from the urban quarter in the north, one from the east, another one from the west through a new passage under the railway and the fifth from the southeast- the designers fold up a system of gently inclined and steeper slopes and structure the site with longer and shorter axes. Hence, they are creating a variety of interesting Ups and Downs, elevated view points and depressed wetlands and ponds. Cutting the earth bodies of the terrain the axes define a hierarchy of different pathways for variable speeds: from the faster bicycle route down to narrow wooden walkways across the wetlands.
Team Parco Sottosopra: Mohammad Al Najdawi (Jordan), Loredana Florentina Cirdei (Romania), Claudia Ferrari (Italy), Nino Gavascheli (Georgia), Ksenia Tkacheva (Russia), Elene Tsutskiridze (Georgia), Sander Van de Putte (Belgium)
Loop Land Scape
Based on a zoning concept respectively on a bubble diagram showing the potentials for future uses in the new park, the designers develop a system of interlocking elliptic spaces on different terrain levels. In spite of their formal similarity, each ‘loop’ has a different size and its own character.
Team Loop Land Scape: Niels De Couvreur (Belgium), Irina Mayorova (Russia), Reem Hamdan (Jordan), Davide Manica (Italy), Giya Elizabeth George (India), Chiara Gregori (Italy), Marta Rodeschini (Italy)
The design results have been developed under the supervision and guidance of Prof. Ingrid Schegk, Landscape Architect, Weihenstephan University of Applied Sciences, Prof. Arch. Fulvio Adobati, Università di Bergamo and PhD. Arch. Elisabetta Bianchessi, Bergamo Landscape and Garden Institute
The territories immediately surrounding Vicenza – where the large-scale Parco della Pace is being built – were reorganized by a complex strategy of landscape transformation and land reclamation in the 16th century in order to improve agriculture. Modulated by a dense network of canals for draining the marshy land, rows of trees and woods interspersed among the pattern made by fields, this historical landscape, nowadays heavily altered, played an essential role in the sophisticated system of relationship that the project establishes with the territory and its past.
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From former airport site to large-scale park
Parco della Pace, designed by a multidisciplinary team led by the Milan-based office Pa+N Associati explores the site’s past by simultaneously addressing both terrain and function. While the park’s compact general composition refers to local natural features, physical forms, traditional agricultural landscape and its structure, specific design elements evoke the site’s infrastructural history (former Dal Molin airport site).
The park’s complex program combines evocations of memory and the site’s history with a process-based design, that aims at wildlife conservation and at favoring and restoring ecological processes. Both the park’s artificial topography and the water network are designed as means to integrate measures for water resources management and storm water management within the park’s design.
Designed as the ground for a peaceful co-existence of all the different species, Parco della Pace responds to the current debate in landscape architecture that calls for parks that combine aesthetic, environmental awareness, and resiliency, to address both the needs of cities, the urban population and those of the wildlife and the environment.
Read more about Parco della Pace in Topos 100
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Denis Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and Its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1993).
Sonja Dümpelmann and Susan Herrington, ‘Plotting Time in Landscape
Architecture’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 34:1 (2014): 1–14.
Sonja Dümpelmann and Charles Waldheim (eds.), Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2016).
John Dixon Hunt, Historic Grounds: the Role of History in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).
Francesca Oddo, ‘Vicenza progetta il Parcodela Pace sull’area dell’ex aeroporto Dal Molin’, Edilizia e Territorio. Quotidiano del Sole 24 Ore, 15.12.2015. http://www.ediliziaeterritorio.ilsole24ore.com/art/progettazione-e-architettura/2015-12-14/vicenza-progetta-parco-pace-area-ex-aeroporto-molin-205143.php?uuid=AC2l7NtB (accessed July 12, 2017)
Alessandra Ongaro, ‘Verso il Parco della Pace’, Officina* bimestrale on-line di Architettura e Tecnologia, 17 (2017). https://www.incipiteditore.it/prodotto/officina-17/
PAN Associati, Milano (Benedetto and Gaetano Selleri with Gwenaelle Charrier, Davide Bossi, Pietro Amato), Team leader; studio Zagari, Roma (Franco Zagari with Viola Corbari, Sarah Amari, Endri Memaj); EMF Marti Franch Arquitectura del Paisatge, Girona (Marti Franch Batllori with Miriam Garcia); ITS Engineering company, Pieve di Soligo (Giustino Moro with Andrea De Pin, Carlotta Sadoch, Carlo Titton); Studio geologico Gino Lucchetta. Consultants: Aspro Studio, Vicenza (Claudio Bertorelli, Francesco Dal Toso); Riccardo Gini; Victor Tenez; Massimo Venturi Ferriolo, Relazione illustrativa. Progetto preliminare. Parco della Pace – Stralcio opere ‘Bando Periferie”. Comune di Vicenza. Agosto 2016. http://195.31.128.25:55555/owncloud/s/w2lxq3rQO7PRhJl#pdfviewer (accessed July 11, 2017)
Laura Pilastro, Parco della Pace. C’è il progetto da 15 milioni’, Il Giornale di Vicenza 13.07.2017 http://www.ilgiornaledivicenza.it/territori/vicenza/parco-della-pace-c’-è-il-progetto-da-15-milioni-1.5829884/amp (accessed July 20, 2017)
Valentina Silvestrini, ‘Un Parco della Pace là dove c’era l’aeroporto Dal Molin”, Artribune, 27.11.2015. http://www.artribune.com/tribnews/2015/11/un-parco-della-pace-la-dove-cera-laeroporto-dal-molin-a-vicenza-al-progetto-chiude-le-aspre-polemiche-antimilitariste-ci-sara-anche-il-giardino-di-john-cage/ (accessed July 19, 2017)
