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A portrait of the man and the architect, aspiring painter, promotor ante litteram of Italian design who, in a career spanning more than fifty years, experimented with everything - arts, crafts, objects, architecture and materials -.
The film tries to explain the reasons for the change in fortune that has recently seen Ponti rediscovered and reproposed, as a model of the European and international architect.
Based on the search for historical material - iconographic sources such as the Ponti Archives and Teche Rai, and an interview with Gio Ponti in his studio in via Dezza, his architectural designs and customized furniture, with testimony from his heirs - as well as interviews with some of today’s prominent figures: Vittorio Gregotti, Fulvio Irace, Enzo Mari, Giovanna and Maria Grazia Mazzocchi, Sandro Mendini, Nanda Vigo, Bob Wilson. With an exclusive interview with the publisher Benedikt Taschen, a great Ponti fan and collector.
The film is curated by Francesca Molteni and produced by Muse, in partnership with the Salvatore Licitra/Gio Ponti Archives, promoted by Molteni&C, which has been producing remakes from the Ponti Collection since 2012, a project that has led to the rediscovery of certain items of furniture designed by the great maestro and never produced on an industrial scale.
In 1938, Gio Ponti, a luminary of 20th-century Italian design, put pen to paper for his as-yet-unfinished Villa Marchesano in Bordighera on the Ligurian coast. Without walls, windows or doors, the drawing captured his intentions for the space: how it would be inhabited and how its residents might grow into it. Ponti believed that architecture should serve the lives of its occupants, creating environments that inspire and enrich daily living, and all of the life that he imagined the house would contain is scribbled on to this large sheet of tracing paper.
Like many of Gio Ponti's other pieces, the D.154.2 was conceived for a private client, the collectors Anala and Armando Planchart, as part of the project for their villa in Caracas, Venezuela.
“Ponti style” is a lifestyle that emerged through six decades of the creative practice of Gio Ponti (1891-1979).
