The Italian architect, designer, and artist Gio Ponti enchanted the world with over sixty years of structures, design objects, and cerebral contributions to the international design landscape that shaped how we viewed design in the 20th century, as sophisticated, economic, democratic, and modern. Over 100 architectural works carry his distinctive signature all over the world, and his vast influence in interior design resonates still today with innovative lightness and high-quality construction.

At the end of World War I, Ponti graduated from the Polytechnic in Milan with a degree in architecture, and then became art director of Richard Ginori, one of Italy’s leading porcelain manufacturers, where he earned the great prize for ceramics at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925. In 1927 he opened his own studio in Milan with architect Emilio Lancia, and in 1928, he founded the renowned architecture and design magazine Domus, which he directed for almost all his life and remains today a leading publication for those curious minds captivated by the world of design.

A passionate advocate for an Italian-style art of living and a major actor in the renewal of Italian design after the second World War, Ponti also helped create one of the most important design awards, the Compasso d’Oro, in 1954. From the graceful Pirelli Tower, a symbol of lithesome modernity that changed Milan’s landscape in the 1950s, to his super light Superleggera chair, where wood becomes as light as aluminum, so light in fact, that it is touted that a child can lift it with just one finger, Ponti exacted freedom, lightness, and luminosity in the greatest of his works, which ranged from domestic interiors, villas and churches, hotels, cruise ships, airline offices, bathroom fittings, lighting, costumes for theater and opera, textiles, tiles, knives and forks, an expresso machine, and even a sewing machine, all with respect for traditional craft and modern production processes, a perfect marriage of the industrial and the unique with acute sensitivities to pattern and volume.

By removing ornament in design, Ponti embraced a formal simplification where structure and style meet in delightful repose, a synergy of elegant beauty and clean functionality. As the artistic director of Fontana Art, and the leader of several Triennales in Milan, Ponti actively inspired an aesthetic of transparency and lightness in Italy, propelling a modern philosophy of living to the world at large. In 1934, he was given the title of Commander of the Royal Order of Vasa in Stockholm, and later he obtained the Accademia d’ Italia Art Prize and the gold medal from the Paris Academie d’Architecture as well as an honorary doctorate from the London Royal College of Art.

Although he passed away in 1979, his legacy lives on with works produced for Cassina, Knoll, Artemide, Poltrana Frau, Tecno, Fontana Arte, Molteni & C, Knupp Italia and Christofle, embracing the effortlessly modern forms and delicate sensibilities that rouse our senses to this day.