The Home is a Stage

In December 1951, Gio Ponti took out a white postcard and began to draw. Across the paper, his pen traced a simple chair, its tapered legs not dissimilar to those he had envisaged for the design of the D.151.4 armchair, created only a few years previously. Yet elsewhere on the postcard, reality slipped into something stranger and more wonderful. Sat atop Ponti’s chair, for instance, is not a person, but a glove. It perches bolt upright and looks out at the card’s recipient, bright lipstick marking out a mouth below its thumb, while an almond eye is stitched into its palm. Emerging from the bottom of the glove, meanwhile, a pair of legs flick out in seated repose, while its thumb and forefinger carefully balance a briar pipe. Instead of smoke, a series of words puff out in curlicues from its bowl: “Buon Natale, Buon 1952 – Happy Christmas, Happy 1952”.

Indeed, the 1951 Christmas card is one of many that Ponti created throughout his life – paper worlds that drew the recipient into Ponti’s imagination and artistry. To Licitra, Ponti’s reputation across 20th-century architecture and design – all of his work is rich in craft, playfulness, material understanding and deep empathy for how people wanted to live – is one that can be interpreted through the lens of theatrical performance and the idea that the modern world could become a stage for new ways of living that broke with the strictures of the past.

Performance through design may have been a lifelong pursuit for Ponti, but for many people the holidays represent a time when theatre’s ideas of collective celebration, imagination and festivity come more naturally to the fore than they might throughout the rest of the year. Across the world, the holidays see people come together to celebrate with their loved ones, and everyday life becomes enchanted with new possibilities. It is a time of year that instinctively lends itself to Ponti’s approach to architecture, in which buildings were to be designed from the inside out, and focused around the ways in which people might live and interact with one another, uniting architecture, interiors and objects in a synthesis that captured his basic intuition that “the point of architecture is life.”

It was with this vision in mind that, earlier this year, Molteni&C released a new collection offering editions of a selection of the objects that Ponti designed throughout his life: the Cavallo and Colombo animal sculptures; the La Mano six-fingered hand; and the Bottiglie bottles, among others. As the year now draws towards its close, it is only right that these same pieces should step out from the wings and take centre stage across a newly curated collection of Ponti’s furnishings and objects that transform the home into a place to be shared with loved ones, and which invite anybody who enters to “live beautifully”.

It is this sense of Ponti’s overarching vision for all areas of design, and the belief that a home should be considered a constantly changing work of art – one with its own rhythm, life, and consideration of every detail – that is expressed within the collection. It is an approach that is shared by Elisa Ossino, one of the people behind the campaign to support Molteni&C’s Gio Ponti Objects collection, whose work explores set design, art direction and interior architecture, and whose practice finds inspiration from, as well as common ground with, Ponti’s own practice.

In the new holiday installation, created by Molteni&C to celebrate the Ponti collection, a birch counter hosts a cavalcade of Ponti’s objects, set against a series of geometric patterns. These patterns have been designed to recall the motifs of Villa Planchart, the home that Ponti created for Anala and Armando Planchart in Caracas, Venezuela, and the building which best expresses Ponti’s belief in the integration of architecture and interior design to generate beautiful, transformative living spaces – he oversaw every element of the private residence’s creation, collaborating with local craftspeople to produce custom furniture, light fixtures, and artwork specifically for the villa. In Molteni&C’s interpretation of the villa, this approach transforms into geometries of coloured triangles and rhombuses that construct a space that doesn’t simply display objects, but which can stage a dialogue with them. Here, the interpretation of Ponti’s work as everyday theatre becomes apparent, with every element in conversation with one another, all in celebration of the manner in which design can support and enrich people’s lives.

In this spirit, Molteni&C’s collection of Ponti’s objects speak to the enduring appeal of these qualities, which hope to add both elegance and character to a home.

As the holidays draw people together, and remind us of the joy, support and love that can spread throughout a home, Ponti’s work expresses how we can all live beautifully and come to share its creator’s belief in the artistry of the everyday.

It is these same principles that caused Ponti himself to regularly return to particular motifs across his design, with many of his objects either referencing or explicitly styled as animals, or else human hands presented in the same fashion as the 1951 postcard.

As we enter the holiday season, this lesson is worth remembering. Ponti showed how beauty should be made available to all, and that living beautifully is a way of being in the world – one that can encompass the spaces and objects we surround ourselves with, but also infuse something as simple as a pen sketching out a postcard.