Design: Gio Ponti

Gio Ponti combined the force of two places, one made of paper which he deliberately called “Domus”, the other made of walls, that of the mechanic’s workshop in Via Dezza which he transformed to house his studio. Here he encouraged and promoted different experiences and built a network of international relations, transforming his design and publishing endeavours – in addition to “Domus”, “Stile” and the extraordinary monographic pamphlet “Aria d’Italia”, Espressione di Gio Ponti, designed with Daria Guarnati – into both physical and figurative incubators where ideas could be exchanged in order to define a new vision of architecture and high-quality products. These places and their rituals, the flow and overlap of different practices, and the invention of a new kind of writing which could describe what was happening, almost like a diary, were the increasingly confident assertion of the top levels being expressed by the Italian arts. Like the Triennale expositions, which Ponti not only organized but also used to boost the presence of architecture and design in the cultural climate of the time. At the 11th Triennale in 1957, in the pavilion for new ideas in building situated in Parco Sempione, Ponti presented two lamps which he had designed in a range of variations. In a preparatory study, some hands are about to grasp a sphere as full as the moon. The word “moon” appears right alongside. And then the sphere is flattened at the ends, along the vertical and horizontal axis, and then half of it is coloured, and then it is slanted. In an endless game of materializing possibilities.