In 1958 the Pirelli Tower was inaugurated in Milan. 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-six, and is finishing 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.

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.

Gio Ponti — main works
Montecatini Building, Milan1936 · offices · marble cladding
Villa Planchart, Caracas1953–57 · “El Cerrito” · floors and walls as painting
Superleggera chair1957 · Cassina · about 1.7 kg
Pirelli Tower, Milan1956–58 · 127 m · with Nervi
Hotel Parco dei Principi, Sorrento1960 · ceramic floors designed by Ponti
Denver Art Museum1971 · with James Sudler · only work in the USA

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.

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.

“Ponti titled a book of 1957 Amate l'architettura, ‘love architecture’. It is not rhetoric. For him architecture was a way of making the lives of others lighter, and lightness was a technical matter: Nervi's structure, the weight of a chair, the thickness of a façade. A 127-metre tower that looks like a leaf says all this, and says it without a word.”