Part 2
With Luigi Font an, who wanted to diversify its glass and panel production, Pont began to develop small decorative objects such as mirrors with ornamental motifs and lamps, which gave rise to Font an Arte, a brand of excellence that is still active today. Thanks to the Parisian exhibition, we can find the extreme contemporaneity of a lamp designed almost ninety years ago, such as Bill (1931), a simple globe of light resting on an inverted cone, or 0024, released in 1933 and still very modern with its light cylinder surrounded by twelve glass plates.
A member of the management of the Monta Fair, Pont created the Labyrinth group (name suggested by Ugo Odette), which includes Carla Visions né Mo drone, Luciano Visions's mother, Pietro Chie sa, Paolo Venin, Tomas Buzz and Emilio Lanka, his partner in the Milanese architectural design studio from which the Domes Nova collective was to emerge. The result of such a group effervescence will be a series of furniture, divided into four types according to the different spaces of the house: bedroom, living room, dining room, office. Thanks to an agreement with the Boulet family, owner of Renascent, this furniture will also be sold at reasonable prices in department stores. For the first Domes Nova collection, Pont chose to build its furniture in ash, one of the cheapest woods, and at MAD you can see the tables, bedrooms, shelves with compartments, bedside tables, backlit furniture, cereal products and intended years later by Pont himself to furnish hotel rooms. At the end of the 1920s, the new guiding idea of interior architecture, based on the urgency of pedagogy, was very simple: it was necessary to educate the new Milanese bourgeoisie to get rid of the old one, to throw away the gloomy and imposing floral furniture of the old dining rooms, with nails, horseshoes, Renaissance grilles, to open to the new taste, that is, not only to deny the old, but to combine antique and modern furniture.
This is how objects of daily use are transmitted to the art of the table, and from the art of the table to furniture and furniture at home and therefore to interior design. The Parisian exhibition offers a complete illustration of Gio Pont's creative and professional career, from ceramics to furniture design, from furniture to house design, and from this to public buildings, such as the University of Rome's School of Mathematics, La Sapiens, a jewel of fascist architectural rationalism, commissioned in 1932 and built in 1935 under the direction of Marcello Piacentini, with its horseshoe plan, the separate buildings, the rectangular school building, the library, the teachers' room, and the two curved wings of the fan-shaped building for the amphitheatres. There are also offices, such as those of the Montecatini group in Milan: a complex with several bodies, built at different times, divided between Via delay Moskova (1935-38) and Largo Donnerai (1947-52), with facades covered with horizontal marble slabs, which Cuzco Malaparte welcomed as a palace of water and leaves. And at the Palazzo Ferra nia, at Corso Matent, at the headquarters D'Épar (later Rai), at Corso Semaine, at the palace of Piazza San Babilla, always renouncing the digitization of rooms, to ensure the optimal flexibility of spaces, not to mention Livia no de Padua, which seems to have been created from a metaphysical painting by Chorizo and is still considered the most beautiful university in the world, for this perfect union between the Bridge spaces and the Campigli frescos. And then the Italian Institute of Culture in Stockholm, with a project that still impresses today with its extraordinary capacity to anticipate taste, and finally skyscrapers like Pirelli, where Ponti's genius found futuristic solutions sixty years ago, even for contemporary archivers. And there are also cathedrals like the one in Taranto, to mention only one, perhaps the most beautiful and unfortunate, whose embroidered facade is reproduced in the entrance panel of the exhibition at MAD.
In the first place of the many Pontin houses is that of Via Domenico, in Milan, in the Fiery district, at the corner of Via Monte Rosa, with the double window on the corner that amplifies the perspective outside those who are watching sitting in the lounge. And there are the heather walnut furniture with its clear lines, the slightly arched feet, the veins that end in the metal ornaments. There is the house in Via Randaccio, architecture after architecture , to use Pont's own definition of what will be his first design gesture after the academic lesson at the Politico di Milano. My father represents a unique case: a former modern architect, says his daughter Lisa. And here too, as in the vases, chandeliers and furniture, the former wife marries the modern in a marriage of love, dictated by fate, where the evocation of the Malcontents and other Venetian villas of Palladio, which Ponti had studied as a child, is combined with the most audacious and unexpected solutions of contemporary architecture, such as open spaces, window walls, the removal of the corridor and the modular space by partitions and swing doors. Mallet Stevens had created the open space for the French pavilion at the 1925 Exhibition, and Ponti took it over to develop and rework it with his Italian touch and a clear philosophy of life: The so-called comfort is not only in the Italian house in the correspondence of things to the needs, the comfort of our lives and the organization of services, but it is something higher which consists in the true meaning of the beautiful Italian word, comfort , Ponti declares in the first issue of Domus magazine, his new editorial adventure launched in January 1928.
The house accompanies our lives, it is the vase of our beautiful and bad hours, it is the time of our noblest thoughts, it must not be in fashion, because it must not be outdated. And Pontin's words accompany the visitor of this exhibition as the common thread of a labyrinthine journey, full of deviations, eclectic in his desire to constantly move from one field to another, but very recognizable and always coherent, because inspired by a clear and substantial cardinal principle, very simple as the fruit of ancient and assimilated wisdom: Let us return to seats, houses, works without labels, without adjectives, just, true, natural, simple and spontaneous.