CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/21/2019

Productive agitation and passionate enthusiasm in 'Gio Ponti: Archi-Designer'

How to describe the irrepressible and prolific Italian architect, designer and Domus founder Gio Ponti, whose worked spanned six decades, and too many fields and genres to categorize? Perhaps his own statement, penned in 1945, says it best: "Gio Ponti, born in Milan in 1891, is an Italian, a Lombard, a Milanese. A cheerful man, ever active, who writes, draws, builds, travels: who loves living. Who doesn't belong to any movement or school but trusts solely in the maturation that comes from his work. He says that maturity contains within it all the ages of life that you bring with yourself; that you find there everything that you've been, but that his maturity is not a source of tranquility. He lives in a state of productive agitation, participating in his time with a passionate enthusiasm." Featured image is the living room of Villa Planchart, Caracas, photographed by Antoine Baralhé in 1957. Representing a butterfly "poised on the ground on its fragile feet," according to essayist Fulvio Irace, it demonstrates Ponti's theory of "finite form," which coincides with the formula for "architecture as crystal."