Gio Ponti

Ever since the start of his career, the work of Giovanni (Gio) Ponti (1891-1979) was profoundly innovative, going beyond the return to neoclassicism characteristic of early twentieth century architecture. Ponti made the architect a promoter of culture and an interpreter of the new “bourgeois taste”. Ponti founded and edited the historic architecture magazines Domus (1928-40 and 1948-1979) and Stile (1941-1947); he sat on the executive committee of the Triennale di Milano and the Biennale di Monza; he taught for many years (1936-1961) at Politecnico di Milano, where he himself had graduated in 1921. Not a member of any modernist ideological movement, with nothing to do with movements and fashions, Ponti saw architecture as the place where multiple aspects of the creative act come together and “style” as a recurrent, recognisable element present in the community in a given society at a given time. He himself did not start ....

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