Gio Ponti experimented in all areas that can be investigated with the filter of design. In addition to architecture, work on art, crafts, design, including car design, and publishing-particularly with Domus-have helped draw the nuanced profile of an experimental and daring designer.
A total reliance on imagination contributed to his very rational investigation. The traces of the possible and the impossible in Ponti's work do not dig parallel, but totally overlapping paths.
The maximum result of his imaginative gaze is tangible in the more than 250 design objects, "tools to be resorted to and kept at hand in order to exercise the theater of imagination in space and time"-writes Salvatore Licitra, Gio Ponti's nephew and founder of Archivio Gio Ponti. These are the things kept in galleries and archives, traceable in books, magazines and drawings or still in production by companies. Molteni&C, a historic Italian design company, launched a program in 2012 to reissue Pontiani's objects, according to an agreement with the master's heirs that includes worldwide exclusivity for the marketing of all the furnishings he designed, except for the rights ceded to other manufacturers.
In this harmonious crib we do not encounter [...] what are commonly called 'furnishing accessories,' but rather catalytic objects for a new way of life, vibrant domestic sentinels, tools to be resorted to and kept at hand in order to exercise the theater of the imagination in space and time.
Salvatore Licitra, grandson of Gio Ponti and founder of Archivio Gio Ponti
The first collection, presented this year, puts eight products in the catalog that are linked by a strong poetic character that in Ponti's work played a fundamental role in the transition from a monumental conception of architecture to one more oriented to human dimensions and needs. Those in Molteni&C's Heritage Collection are products conceived by Ponti between 1935 and the 1970s as unique pieces or for small series and reissued by the Italian company in collaboration with the Gio Ponti Archives and under the artistic direction of Studio Cerri & Associati.
The objects-different in use, forms and materials-indicate Gio Ponti's multifaceted approach, the outcome as well of a tireless exchange with the most influential personalities and realities of his time, such as the silversmith Sabbatini, the Buccheri Antonio Rossi workshop in Gubbio, and the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, a partner in the design of the Pirelli Skyscraper. The objects made with Lino Sabbatini - in silver in the original version - are reborn in stainless steel, alongside the set of wooden "Bottles" and the bucchero vase, the result of sensitive and careful research into the material.