Gio Ponti, Milan
There is a particular kind of designer who cannot leave anything alone. Gio Ponti designed a skyscraper and a cathedral, but also the cutlery for the tables inside buildings like them, the tiles for their floors, the bottles on their shelves, and the magazine in which he then wrote about all of it. Over a working life of almost sixty years he put his hand to something like a hundred buildings and many thousands of objects. Milan is still counting.
He was born there in 1891, and in every way that mattered he never left. He trained as an architect at the Politecnico di Milano, an education interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as an officer, and graduated in 1921. His first important post, though, was not a building. In 1923 he became artistic director of Richard Ginori, the old Florentine porcelain manufacturer, and set about bringing the classical world back to its tableware: urns and covered vases painted with architectural fantasies, slender figures, obelisks, perspectives of imaginary cities. The work took a grand prix at the Paris Exposition of 1925. It established the conviction that would define him - that industry, craft and art were not rival camps but a single conversation.
In 1928 he founded Domus. The magazine was meant as a guide to the modern Italian house, and under Ponti, who edited it for most of the rest of his life, it became something closer to a manifesto in instalments. He published architects and craftsmen side by side. He published furniture, glass, ceramics, fabric and gardens as though they were all part of the same argument, because to him they were.
The buildings came steadily. The first Montecatini offices in Milan in 1936. The school of mathematics at the new university city in Rome. After the war, a run of houses and hotels that showed what Italian modernism might look like when it allowed itself pleasure - among them the Hotel Royal in Naples, furnished by the Lissone cabinetmaker Vittorio Dassi, and the Villa Planchart in Caracas, designed down to the last door handle for a Venezuelan collector and his wife. Then, between 1956 and 1960, the Pirelli Tower: more than thirty storeys of tapering concrete and glass beside Milan's Central Station, engineered with Pier Luigi Nervi, so slim in profile that it reads less like an office block than a blade. For decades it was the tallest building in Italy. It is still, arguably, the most elegant.
Yet Ponti's most famous object weighs about 1.7 kilograms. The Superleggera chair, made by Cassina in Meda from 1957, was his refinement of the simple ladder-back chairs made for generations in the Ligurian town of Chiavari. He shaved its ash frame down until a child could lift it with one finger, and for the publicity photograph that is exactly what a child did. It was a chair about restraint, made by a man who otherwise seemed to have none.
That appetite is what makes him so present in the Italian rooms of the period. Ponti designed glass for Venini on Murano and lighting for Fontana Arte in Milan, cutlery for Krupp and silver for Christofle, and cabinets and bureaux with Piero Fornasetti, whose printed architectural fantasies sat perfectly on Ponti's precise forms. His furniture was built in the workshops of the Brianza, the cabinetmaking towns north of Milan - Meda, Cantù, Lissone - by craftsmen who could take a drawing and give it the exactness it asked for. A Ponti piece of the 1950s has a recognisable set of habits: legs that taper to a point as though drawn with a sharp pencil, surfaces that seem to float a little above their supports, a lightness that is engineered rather than assumed.
His influence reached well beyond the pieces that carry his name. Ponti's look - slim, airy, faintly classical, never solemn - became the house style of a whole generation of Italian furniture, picked up and reworked by cabinetmakers who had seen his drawings in Domus or built his designs in their own workshops. A great deal of the finest unsigned Italian furniture of the 1950s is, in a sense, in conversation with him.
He kept working into his eighties. The Co-Cathedral of Taranto, finished in 1970, lifts a pierced white screen high above its façade, light and wind passing straight through it like a sail. The Denver Art Museum, completed the following year, is clad in more than a million small grey glass tiles. He died in Milan in 1979.
In 1957, the same year as the Superleggera, he published a book called Amate l'architettura - Love architecture. It reads less like a treatise than a long letter from someone who simply could not understand why anyone would want to make anything badly. Not because he was a perfectionist, but because he found the whole business of making things such a pleasure. That pleasure is visible in everything he touched. It is the reason his work still looks, seventy years on, as though it were drawn this morning.
The Leopard's collection of vintage Italian furniture, from the Brianza workshops where designs like Ponti's were built, is in store in Moss Vale and online. Also in store is an original Ponti sofa in the original gold velvet.