Ponti, Gio
Ponti, Gio ( Giovanni Ponti) (1891–1979). Italian architect and designer. His earliest work was first influenced by the Sezession movement and then by the clear rational architecture of Otto Wagner. (e.g. the house on Via Randaccio, Milan (1924–5), and the Bouilhet Villa, Garches, near Paris (1925–6), in both of which a simplified Neo-Classicism may be detected). He was founder-director of the influential architectural journal Domus (1928–79), which is perhaps his greatest legacy, and demonstrated his Rationalist and Classicist credentials with the School of Mathematics, University of Rome (1934). In 1936–9 he built the Montecatini Building, Milan, in which standardization played a major role (a second block was completed in 1951). His work after the 1939–45 war abandoned all traces of Classical formalism, as in the Pirelli Tower, Milan (1956–8—with Nervi and others), one of the first skyscrapers to deviate from the rectangular slab-form common in International Modernism. Other buildings include the Bijenkorf Shopping Centre, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1967—with others), the Cathedral, Taranto (1969–71), and the Museum of Modern Art, Denver, CO (1972—with others).
Bibliography
Kalman (1994);
Ponti (1990);
Romaneli (2002);
Jane Turner (1996);
van Vynckt (ed.) (1993);
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Ponti, Gio