The prolific architect, designer and Domus editor reinvented the look of everyday life from the spoon to the cathedral With more than 100 buildings and scores of design objects to his name, Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti revolutionized postwar architecture and opened up prospects for new ways of life. Gio Ponti: Archi-Designer covers Ponti's entire career from 1921 to 1978, highlighting the many aspects of his work: from mechanical production to handicraft, from architecture to industrial design, from furniture to lighting, from the creation of magazines to his forays into the fields of glass, ceramics and goldsmithing. His work exemplified a certain tendency identified by his fellow architect Ernesto Rogers in 1952, an interest in designing dal cucchiaio alla città ("from the spoon to the town")--giving equal attention and applying the same innovative design thinking to small spoon and skyscraper alike. Featuring more than 500 pieces, this book traces Ponti's multidisciplinary journeys through architecture, furniture and design in his work for private homes and public buildings, including universities and cathedrals. Regarded as one of the most influential architects and designers of the 20th century, Giovanni "Gio" Ponti (1891-1979) established his architectural firm in 1921 and was extraordinarily prolific from that point on, working as an architect, industrial designer, artist, furniture designer, teacher and writer. In 1928 he founded the magazine Domus, which he would direct for most of his life, helping to spread his vision of a revitalized modern aesthetics in Italian industrial production, architecture, interior design and the decorative arts.

This is the first complete survey and thematic profile of one of the most prolific and accomplished Italian architects of the century. From the Richard-Ginori chinaware and the founding of Domus magazine in the 1920s and '3Os, to the Pirelli tower erected in Milan in the 1950s to the "facade" architecture of the '70s, Gio Ponti has been a major force in the shaping of twentieth-century Italian design. The Complete Work presents a fully illustrated decade-by-decade account of Ponti's vast output in interior and industrial design, decorative arts, and architecture. It describes his powerful influence on generations of Italian designers, his contributions to Italy's urban culture, and his role as a propagandist and editor. Gio Ponti was not only an architect but a poet, painter, polemicist, and designer of exhibitions, theater costumes, Venini glassware, Arthur Krupp tableware, Cassina furniture, lighting fixtures, and ocean liner interiors. He is perhaps best known as the architect of Milan's Pirelli tower, at one time the tallest building in Europe, and for his "Super-leggera" chair which was first manufactured in the '50s and has become classic because of its almost universal use in Italian restaurants. Above all, Ponti was responsible for the renewal of Italian architecture and decorative arts. Drawing upon the legacy of the Viennese Secession and the Wiener Werkstatte, he transformed "classical" language into a rationalist vocabulary. The entire photographic archive of Ponti's studio, together with his unpublished writings, were made available for the first time for the preparation of this book. There are many new photographs of his work and a broad selection of his letters, diaries and essays. A biographical profile, bibliography, and chronologies of works, exhibitions, and sales round out this stunning book Lisa Licitra Ponti is curator of the Ponti Archives, She is also a well-known art and architecture critic. She collaborated with her father from 1940 until his death in 1979.

This book on Giò Ponti illustrates, with over 650 images, nearly all the architect-designer s work in this specific field over fifty years of activity from 1920 to 1970.

The work of Italian architect, artist, planner, craftsman, designer, and visionary Gio Ponti (1891-1979) is pivotal in the history of twentieth-century artistic culture. This remarkable book offers an extensive selection of Ponti's projects - over 150 of them - accompanied by designs, sketches, plans, photographs, and Ponti's own copious writings. Following an initial classical period of activity, Ponti went on to champion the importance of the individual during the overwhelming surge of mass-production promoted by Modernism. Ponti's writings in Domus during his long tenure as editor, and his designs for ceramics manufacturer Richard-Ginori, Alfa Romeo, the furniture company Cassina, fixtures-maker American Standard, and many other manufacturers, all testify to his vision for a modern society in which good design was available to the common person, and life, art, and architecture were inseparable. Gio Ponti also presents Ponti's architecture, including the famous Montecatini Building in Milan (1936), the interior of the luxury liner Andrea Doria (1951), the Pirelli Tower (1956), the Museum of Modern Art in Denver (1972), and numerous other residential and office buildings, churches, retail spaces, villas, and universities that Ponti designed between the early 1920s and 1978.