A Retrospective On The Work Of Influential Italian Architect And Designer Gio Ponti

Gio Pontis approach to design offers important lessons for today: good design applies to everything froma cathedral to an espresso machine.

- Catherine Shaw

Most people who think of Gio Ponti picture his elegantly simple Superleggera chair, created for Cassina in 1957—a chair so light that a child could pick it up with one finger—or the razor-edged Pirelli Tower which, when it was built in Milan in 1958, was the tallest building in Europe.

But the remarkably versatile Italian architect and designer deserves recognition for so much more. During a prolific six-decade creative career he worked for 120 companies, built projects in 13 countries, produced and contributed to 560 issues as a magazine editor, wrote poetry, painted and taught.

Not surprisingly, he was a renowned workaholic sleeping only five hours a night. When he died in 1979 at the age of 87, he was regarded as one of the most influential and revolutionary Italian architects and designers of the 20th century, having jumpstarted Italy’s cultural renaissance of the 1950s.

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