Interior-design magazine covers give us a fresh look at a designer of an upper-class designer. Text by Francesco Bonami.

On April 18, 2002, a small Rockwell Commander aeroplane piloted by 67-year-old Swiss-based Luigi Fasulo arrived at around five pm over Milan from Locarno. It then flew into the upper floors of the Pirelli building, the urban icon and only skyscraper in Milan designed in 1956 by Gio Ponti. The plane smashed against the glass windows killing five people, pilot included. For a moment Italy saw its own micro 9/11. After a terrorist attack had been ruled out as well as a military strike by the otherwise neutral and pacific Switzerland, people started to wonder what had happened. The Pirelli building is hard to miss in Milan’s skyline, but also easy to avoid if there is no fog, and that afternoon there was good visibility. It turned out that the Swiss Mohammed Atta was allegedly a depressed, retired person who chose to end his life in that spectacularly pathetic and tragic way, dragging four innocent people into his own folly. None of the victims of the crash probably knew that the building was a landmark of Italian architecture and a daring feat by one of its most distinguished postwar architects. Had the outcome not been so tragic, the cast of characters might have suggested that the event had been orchestrated by Francesco Vezzoli as an art performance, happening or some kind of artistic intervention.

Vezzoli’s morbid fascination with second-rate characters or faded stars resurrected from a range of fields from movies to fashion and architecture could have justified a project like that one of a small plane flying into Gio Ponti’s self-made monument. In 2002 Francesco Vezzoli was not thinking in such a heroic way. In fact, rather than turning his models into heroes, his perverse fantasy was focused on transforming them in doilies to decorate the living room of some old archetypical modernist aunt. Some people see Gio Ponti as a semi-divinity who could likely appear as a miracle or hallucination on top of the Pirelli building; Francesco Vezzoli sees him more as a saint of a lesser god who fits perfectly on top of a fake baroque cupboard under a vase of fake flowers. Icon-phobic or iconoclast, it’s hard to say in the case of Vezzoli. But his reading of Gio Ponti as the designer of the gay culture of upper-end home decorators, particularly in the United States, is quite interesting. Any respectable antique dealer of modern furniture in Manhattan has a “Gio Ponti” piece. Gio Ponti is the safety net for any unnamed object or piece of furniture that looks particularly good but whose designer is yet to be discovered; “We believe it is a Gio Ponti,” is usually the answer to the puzzled expression of a client looking at the five-figure price tag hanging from a 12-inch side table.

According to Vezzoli, Gio Ponti created his own international style foreseeing a taste not yet so ghettoised as it is today by gay culture. The Italian architect and founder of this magazine would have been horrified to have met people like Schwarzenegger or Robert Mapplethorpe, terrified to know their friends and partners. His idea of space would not have sustained the sexual brutally of the underworld of the late ’70s or early ’80s; his light touch magically manifested in the “superleggera” chair would have crumbled under the bodies of Mapplethorpe’s models. And yet the contrast imagined by Vezzoli is fascinating and challenging, posing very scary questions for those who see Ponti as a symbol of the soft flirtatious machismo of the Italian innovative economic Renaissance of the ’50s and early ’60s. Vezzoli’s question is basically this: “Was Ponti a closet homosexual?” In case of an affirmative answer I wonder if the closet he was hiding in had his own original signature. Francesco Bonami