Tatoitalia / Pendants & Suspension Lights / Luna Sospensione TLU100

Gio Ponti is one of the most important figures in twentieth-century architecture and arts. He graduated in Milan in 1921. From 1923 to 1930 he was artistic director of the Richard Ginori company. In 1928 he founded the magazine “Domus”, which would be followed by other great publishing feats such as “Stile”. Dating from the late 1920s are the “typical homes”, emblematically called “Domus”, which combined the concept of Italianness with an interest in rationalist theories. Right from the start, he took part in the Triennale design expositions in Milan. In 1936 he became professor in the Architecture Faculty at the Politecnico di Milano. With Antonio Fornaroli and Alberto Rosselli, in the studio in Via Dezza which would become his home, he conceived an extraordinary series of projects, expressing his “finite form” theory in the fields of furniture with the “organized walls”, design and architecture: to quote just a few, the Superleggera chair, Pirelli skyscraper, Villa Planchart, followed in the 1960s and 70s by the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome and Sorrento, the churches of San Francesco and San Carlo in Milan, Denver Museum in Colorado and the cathedral of Taranto.

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.