IN PRAISE OF ARCHITECTURE
Gio Ponti
Gio Ponti: IN PRAISE OF ARCHITECTURE. New York: F. W. Dodge Corporation, 1960. First English edition. A very good or better hardcover book in a very good or better dust jacket: architect stamp obscured by front jacket flap and light wear overall. Few pencil underlines throughout textblock. A title seldom offered.5.75 x 7.75 hardcover book with 270 pages profusely illustrated in black and white. preface by Mario Salvadori. First English-language translation of AMATE L'ARCHITETTURA publishedin Italy in 1957. In AMATE L'ARCHITETTURA Ponti extolled his audience to "Love architecture, be it ancient or modern. Love it for its fantastic, adventurous and solemn creations; for its inventions; for the abstract, allusive and figurative forms that enchant our spirit and enrapture our thoughts. Love architecture, the stage and support of our lives."
From the Richard-Ginori chinaware and the founding of Domus magazine in the 1920s and '30s, 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.
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.
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