On 4 April 1960 the Pirelli Tower was inaugurated in Milan, after four years of construction. It is 127 metres tall, has 32 floors, and its plan is not a rectangle but an elongated hexagon with two narrow ends. It has no flat front: from no viewpoint does it look like a parallelepiped. Seen from Piazza Duca d'Aosta it is perceived as a blade rising from the ground; seen from the side, as a sail. For decades it was the tallest building in Italy. Its author, Gio Ponti (1891–1979), is sixty-eight, and has just finished the most important project of a career begun more than thirty years earlier.
The project is collective. Ponti designs the form and coordinates the group with Antonio Fornaroli, Alberto Rosselli, Giuseppe Valtolina and Egidio Dell'Orto; the structure is by Pier Luigi Nervi and Arturo Danusso. A system of great reinforced-concrete walls runs the full height of the building and carries the floors, reducing the need for intermediate columns. The tapered ends, which Ponti needs to make the mass light, coincide with the most efficient structural solution. It is a rare case: form and structure are the same thing, and neither had to give way.
Looking closely at the tower, this agreement can be read. Nervi's great load-bearing walls are four, arranged in pairs at the centre of the plan, and at the two ends the structure closes in hollow triangular elements containing stairs and services. They all taper as they rise, because the upper floors carry less weight: the reduction in thickness, invisible from the street, is the technical reason for the lightness the eye perceives. The continuous curtain wall of glass and aluminium, thin and regular, lets this rhythm show through, and at the top the roof detaches from the body of the building with a slit of light, as if it were floating. The tower is at once a feat of cutting-edge engineering and an exercise in proportion.
An architect who was also an editor
The Pirelli is almost the conclusion of a path. Ponti graduated from the Politecnico di Milano in 1921, after the First World War in which he fought, and for years worked as a designer for the Richard-Ginori ceramics factory, drawing vases and porcelain. In 1928 he founded Domus, the magazine he directed almost without interruption until his death, and which became one of the main places of discussion on architecture and design in Europe. He taught at the Politecnico. He directed the Triennale. He designed furniture with Cassina, a building for Montecatini (Milan, 1936), the Mathematics building of the University of Rome, a hotel in Sorrento.
Behind this variety lies a precise idea, which Ponti set out in 1933 in a short text that became famous, La casa all'italiana. The Italian house, he argued, is not a shelter closed against the climate like the northern house, but a space open to the outside, made of loggias, terraces, large windows and light colours; and it should be furnished with beautiful, useful objects made by industry, not with copies of antique furniture. It is a programme uniting architecture and design, which explains why Ponti worked with the same seriousness on a skyscraper and on a set of cutlery. Among his best-known objects is also an espresso machine, designed in 1948 for La Pavoni, with a horizontal, streamlined form that set the style for postwar bars.
Between the 1940s and 1950s Ponti also designed the interiors of several Italian ocean liners, such as the Conte Grande, the Giulio Cesare and the Andrea Doria, which sank off New York in 1956. The ships were floating showcases of Italian design: Ponti involved artists and craftsmen, from ceramicists to painters, turning saloons and cabins into a sequence of light, bright spaces. It was an experience that taught him to design compact spaces, attended to down to the smallest detail, and to work with large teams of collaborators: two abilities that would reappear on the Pirelli building site.
His work at Richard-Ginori was his first international success. Appointed artistic director of the manufactory in 1923, Ponti completely renewed its catalogue of porcelain and ceramics, designing vases, plates and figures that reinterpreted classicism in an ironic, modern key, and at the great Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1925 he won the Grand Prix. It was in these years that he became convinced that designers should work with industry to bring quality into everyday life, and not only into luxury objects. Domus, founded three years later with the publisher Gianni Mazzocchi, grew out of this conviction: a magazine for architects, but also for people furnishing their own homes. Ponti edited it for almost half a century, with a single break in the 1940s, when he launched another magazine, Stile.
His own home also tells of lightness as a method. In the apartment building on Via Dezza in Milan, built in 1957, Ponti designed an apartment for himself in which the rooms are separated by sliding partitions that can be opened to turn the whole floor into a single space. The furniture is hung on the walls or slender, the windows are placed to frame the city like paintings, and the floor is a single continuous pattern of tiles. The house is not a set of closed rooms but an environment that changes over the course of the day. It is the domestic version of the idea behind the Superleggera: removing weight, physical and visual, from everything that is not needed.
Lightness as a method
Ponti often uses the word “light” and it is not a metaphor. The Superleggera chair (1957, for Cassina) is inspired by a traditional Ligurian chair from Chiavari, but reduced to the minimum: it weighs very little, can be lifted with one finger, and withstands intense use. In the Villa Planchart in Caracas (1953–57), on a hill, the walls are covered with coloured surfaces like paintings, and the floors are designed like ceramic carpets. The underlying idea is that the house is not a container but a stage: a space to be lived in as one inhabits a work of art.
The Caracas villa was commissioned by the collectors Armando and Anala Planchart, who left Ponti free to design everything, from the building to the furniture, textiles and cutlery. Ponti compared it to a butterfly resting on the hill: a volume that seems weightless, with thin roofs and walls that stop short of the ceiling, so that space flows from one room to the next. Today the house is open to the public as a foundation and is one of the most complete examples of his idea of a total work. Something similar happens at the Parco dei Principi hotel in Sorrento, where the floors of the rooms and common areas are made of white and blue tiles produced in dozens of different patterns that can be combined in countless variations: every room is different, yet all belong to the same design.
An anecdote that Ponti and Cassina were happy to use circulates about the Superleggera: to prove its strength, the chair was supposedly thrown from a fourth-floor window, bouncing on the ground without breaking. True or embellished, the anecdote says what matters. Ponti's lightness is not fragility: it is the result of meticulous work on sections, joints and materials, the same work Nervi did with reinforced concrete. That is why the chair, almost seventy years after its birth, is still in production.
This attention to surface and colour is what sets him apart from the masters of the Modern Movement, and what earned him a long ambivalent judgement: too decorative for the purists, too little theoretical for historians. But his buildings age well. The Denver Art Museum (1971), his only work in the United States, is a tower that looks like a castle, with a cladding of about a million grey glass tiles that catch the Colorado light. In recent decades critics have taken him up again as an author: the master of architecture that does not take itself too seriously.
One of his last works takes this idea to its limit. In the co-cathedral of the Gran Madre di Dio in Taranto, completed in 1970, the main façade encloses nothing: it is a large concrete screen pierced by rows of openings, rising above the body of the church like a sail, through which one sees the sky. Ponti described it as a façade "of air", meant to be seen from a distance and reflected in the pools of water in front of it. It is an architecture that gives up volume to rely on drawing and light, and it shows, at the end of a very long career, how faithful Ponti had remained to the same intuition.
The Pirellone after Pirelli
In 1978 the tower was bought by the Region of Lombardy, and since then it has housed the Regional Council: for the Milanese it is simply the Pirellone. The name remains tied to the company that commissioned it, even though Pirelli left it almost half a century ago: its headquarters are now at Bicocca, in the area that once housed the group's factories. The name remains tied to the company that commissioned it, even though Pirelli left it almost half a century ago: its headquarters are now at Bicocca, in the area that once housed the group's factories. On 18 April 2002 a small private plane crashed into the twenty-sixth floor, killing the pilot and two people working in the building. Nervi and Danusso's structure held without failure, and a careful restoration followed that renewed façades, services and interiors while respecting the original design. In later years the top floor, the belvedere, has periodically been opened to the public, and from there you can see how slender the tower is: at its ends, the plan narrows to just a few metres.
For those who want to get to know Ponti in Milan, the route is rich. Besides the Pirellone, opposite the Central Station, you can see the first Montecatini building on Via Turati, with its marble cladding and custom-designed aluminium window frames; the church of San Francesco al Fopponino, with its lozenge-patterned façade; and his furniture in the collections of the Triennale Design Museum. But perhaps the best way to understand him is to sit on a Superleggera, lift it with two fingers and realise that such a light object can last for decades: it is the same idea that, at a different scale, holds up the tower's 127 metres.